Derek mentioned “upstream packaging” on this week’s packaging meeting and asked RDO packagers to participate in the upstream discussions. I thought some more context might be useful.
First, a little history …
When I first started contributing to OpenStack, it briefly looked like I would need to make some Ubuntu packaging updates in order to get a Nova patch landed. At the Essex design summit a few weeks later, I raged at Monty Taylor how ridiculous it would be to require a Fedora packager to fix Ubuntu packaging in order to contribute a patch. I was making the point that upstream projects should leave packaging to the downstream packaging maintainers. Upstream CI quickly moved away from using packages after that summit, and I’ve heard Monty cite that conversation several times as why upstream should not get into packaging.
Meanwhile, Dan Prince was running the Smokestack CI system at the time, which effectively was being treated as OpenStack’s first “third party CI”. Interestingly, Smokestack was using packages to do its deployment, and for a long time Dan was successfully keeping packaging up to date such that Smokestack could build packages for patches proposed in gerrit.
And then there’s been the persistent interest in “chasing trunk”. Operators who want to practice Continuous Deployment of OpenStack from trunk. How does packaging fit in that world? Well, the DevOps mantra of doing development and CI in environments that model your production environment applies. You should be using packaging as early on in your pipeline as possible.
My conclusion from all of that is:
- A key part in building a Continuous Delivery pipeline for OpenStack is to practice continuous package maintenance. You can glibly say this is “applying a DevOps mindset to package maintenance”.
- How awesome would it be if OpenStack had “upstream infrastructure for downstream package maintainers”. In other words, if downstream package maintainer teams could do their work close to the upstream project, using upstream infrastructure, without disrupting upstream development.
I think the work that Derek, Alan, Dan, John, and everyone else has been doing on Delorean is really helping RDO maintainers figure out how to practice (1). I first started maintaining Fedora packages for Fedora Core 2, so IMO what RDO is doing here is really dramatic. It’s a very different way of thinking about package maintenance.
As for (2), this where we get back on topic …
At a Design Summit session in Vancouver, the idea of maintaining packaging using upstream infra really took hold. Thomas Goirand (aka zigo) proposed the creation of a “distribution packaging” team and this triggered a healthy debate on openstack-dev. Derek has since pushed a WIP patch showing how RDO packaging could be imported.
There’s a clear desire on the part of the Debian and Ubuntu package maintainers to collaborate on shared packaging, and it sounds like this goal of further collaboration is one of the primary motivators for moving their packaging upstream. This makes a lot of sense, given the shared heritage of Debian and Ubuntu.
The RDO team is enthusiastic about adopting this sort of upstream workflow, but the Debian/Ubuntu collaboration has added an entirely new aspect to the conversation. Despite the fact that RDO and SUSE platforms have little in the way of shared heritage, shouldn’t the RDO and SUSE packaging teams also collaborate, since they both use the RPM format? And perhaps deb and rpm maintainers should also collaborate to ensure consistency?
To my mind, the goal here should be to encourage downstream packaging teams to work closer to the upstream project, and have downstream packaging teams collaborate more with upstream developers. This is about upstream infrastructure for downstream teams, rather than a way to force collaboration between downstream teams, simply because forced collaboration rarely works.
For me, what’s hugely exciting about all of this is the future prospect of the package maintainers for different platforms adopting a “continuous packaging” workflow and working closely with project developers, to the extent that packaging changes could even be coordinated with code changes. With its amazing infrastructure, OpenStack has broken new ground for how open-source projects can operate. This could be yet another breakthrough, this time demonstrating how a project’s infrastructure can be used to enable an entirely new level of collaboration between package maintainers and project developers.