launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 05/21/2012 03:09 PM, Francesco Banconi wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've written a LEP draft about Launchpad setup scripts improvement.
> The Yellow squad, as you already know, is working on the parallel tests
> project, which uses https://launchpad.net/lpsetup as part of its process
> to create the required testing environment.
> 
> We are improving lpsetup so that it can be used to set up Launchpad
> development instances, optionally inside LXC containers, and that's the
> reason of this LEP.
> 
> If you are interested please glance at
> https://dev.launchpad.net/LEP/LaunchpadSetupScripts
> 
> Any feedback and suggestions are appreciated.

Robert gave us a lot of time and feedback for this.  We revised the LEP
significantly based on his feedback--particularly the "Must"s and so on.

We put his thoughts, which we have largely incorporated; and some
implementation notes on separate pages, so the "Thoughts?" section is
largely blank once again.  Thoughts are again welcome, though we will
soon (end of week, say?) regard this as having received enough attention
for us to proceed.

We diverged from Robert's suggestions in a few points that we know of:

 * We still plan to have lpsetup and lp-dev-utils separate.  Rationale
is listed in the LEP, but for convenience:
   * lp-dev-utils is more for lxc container and lpsetup is more for host.
   * Moving lpsetup to lp-dev-utils is a non-trivial task because it
means packaging lp-dev-utils for lucid and precise.
   * Because we don't believe it is the right thing and this is a slack
time task, we don't intend to do it.
 * Robert encouraged us to not support non-LXC environments, for a
tighter focus.  A non-LXC environment is very valuable (to us!) when you
want to determine whether a problem is specific to LXC, so we kept it.
He already approved this, I think.
 * Robert encouraged us to only support lightweight checkouts, and not
branches (for colocated use or otherwise), again for a tighter focus.
We felt we mostly had the code for branches anyway, and we knew some
people (Aaron, for instance) liked and used colocated branches, so we
wanted to keep them.  That said, this is perhaps a maintenance burden,
and perhaps it would be appropriate to push back on us here, so we'll
certainly listen.

I think we're largely on the same page otherwise.

Francesco was about to be able to officially release, but with these
changes it will probably be an additional few weeks of slack time before
we see a release. If you want to follow along, the code is in
https://launchpad.net/lpsetup and you can get the package in the Yellow
squad's PPA (https://code.launchpad.net/~yellow/+archive/ppa).

Gary