openstack team mailing list archive

[Soren Hansen <soren@xxxxxxxxxx>]

2011/2/17 Jim Curry <jim.curry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> By defining an unbreakable reference platform, are we necessarily limiting its ability to integrate on other platforms?  That is my underlying question.  I understand the need for a reference platform but am trying to understand to what extent that results in us not being able to easily support other platforms (or not).

Oh, I see. Thanks for clarifying. I don't think this limits us in that
respect at all. I don't think we've ever rejected patches that would
allow us to run on other platforms (and I can't imagine we ever
would).

That said, Ubuntu offers a very up-to-date selection of software that
we can build upon. Not being limited by a static, out-of-date set of
dependencies is very much the reason we can move forward at the pace
that we do. Other distros might not have all the dependencies we need.
Yet, at least. It's possible they will in their next release.

If we take the example from my previous e-mail in this thread.. There
was a race condition that was caused by a bug in Eventlet. There were
two[1] ways to fix it: 1) Fix it in Eventlet or 2) accept Eventlet's
brokenness and attempt to work around it. Once the problem was
identified and I was at a point where I knew I had to make that
decision, option 1) took probably about an hour or so, includiing
filing the bug with eventlet, providing them with a test case, writing
a patch, uploading it to Ubuntu, and backporting it to multiple
version of Ubuntu in our PPA's. It's not entirely inconceivable that
I'd still be working on option 2 right now (we rely pretty heavily on
Eventlet). If someone wants to put Nova into some other distribution
they "just" need to make sure that the eventlet in said distro has
this patch applied.

[1]: Well, there's a third: Monkey patch eventlet. I'm just afraid I'd
be caught in an infinite loop of irony.

-- 
Soren Hansen
Ubuntu Developer    http://www.ubuntu.com/
OpenStack Developer http://www.openstack.org/