launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Michael Hudson <michael.hudson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stuart Bishop wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Hey guys,
>>
>> The last time I sat down with a keen potential Launchpad hacker and
>> got them set up with Launchpad, it took about six hours.
>>
>> Granted, this was on Karmic before Max Bowsher et al made it actually
>> possible to use Karmic. But it's still a long time.
>>
>> What can we do to make it easier to go from "I want to hack on
>> Launchpad" to "I have a running development instance of Launchpad"?
> 
> Write a fully scripted install that turns a minimally installed hardy or
> karmic box into a Launchpad development environment.

We have this already, actually, in the ec2 scripts.  It's a bit minimal
I guess because it only sets things up to the point where tests run,
rather than development getting done, but it's a start at least.

I used this to build the images that ec2test now uses.  It takes about
an hour to build, bundle and upload a new image.

> Use this script to rebuild virtual machine images and ec2 images nightly.
> 
> Publish them if they pass basic tests.
> 
> Developers can download and boot the virtual machine. The ec2 tools can
> use the new images.

I agree with Julian that publishing the script is likely more useful
than publishing the images.

Pushing things into a vm is a neat idea for getting around the "stomping
on your apache config" issue.

> Future:
> 
> - Staging can use the image.
> - Production rollouts can be simplified by booting new cloud boxes and
> cutting over using the load balancer rather than rolling upgrades done
> in place and the horrible backout procedure if things go wrong.

I'd certainly be interested in hearing what the OSAs think of this idea :-)

Cheers,
mwh