openstack team mailing list archive

["Bernhard M. Wiedemann" <ubuntubmw@xxxxxxxx>]

On 01/17/2012 08:20 PM, Joshua Harlow wrote:
> My goals were/are/(may continue to be, haha) the following:
>
>
>   1.  Add in enough abstraction so that you can look at how each component is installed/uninstalled/started/stopped by looking at a single file (maybe 2 files)
>   2.  Have the ability to start/stop in different manners (not always screen)
>   3.  Have the ability to have pkg/pip installation (and definition separate from the main code, already starting to be done), in more than 1 distro.
>      *   This allows others to easily know what versions of packages work for a given openstack release for more than one distro (yes that's right, more than ubuntu)
>   4.  Increase the level of documentation (probably not going to be in the end, inline like what is in devstack, since that just doesn't seem maintainable in the long-term)
>      *   This may mean having documentation created similar to nova, glance, as a separate documentation document/page....
>
> Still be simple "enough" to run and use so that the non-python dev can install from trunk without having to understand what is going on.
>
> -Josh

I was looking into how easy it would be to support openSUSE / SLES in 
devstack v2 and saw that there are currently 17 json files containing 
package names (with 293 versions) for ubuntu-oneiric and rhel-6. 
Shouldn't there be some better way than to list all this redundant 
information there, which makes it hard to maintain/extend?

E.g. the distro's package manager already knows about dependencies and 
usually has just one version of a package for a given distribution anyway.
And there was even one project about mapping package-names of one Linux 
distribution to another:
http://enricozini.org/2011/debian/distromatch/
So it should be possible to build upon it, and just list packages once.

Ciao
Bernhard M.