openstack team mailing list archive

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Thomas,

On Wed, 2012-03-21 at 00:40 +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:

> I'm again and again always told that I should use Devstack. I don't
> agree, and I'd like to share why.

I'd summarize your points as:

  - devstack is only tested for a specific version of Ubuntu

  - you're working on making OpenStack available for Debian users

  - devstack is neither documentation nor the canonical way of deploying
    OpenStack

  - it's not helpful for upstream developers to point downstream users 
    or packagers at devstack

  - developers should work on a git checkout of a single project and 
    packages for the other projects

I mostly agree with you. Downstream users want to consume packages and
upstream developers should be concious of what downstream packagers need
to do in order to get OpenStack into the hands of these users.

However, I do think devstack is seriously useful for upstream developers
and I'm delighted that it's gaining Fedora support because it means I'll
use it more for my upstream work.

I've worked as downstream packager and upstream developer on quite a
number of projects before OpenStack and came to the conclusion long ago
that they're two completely different modes of development. When I'm
working on Fedora packaging, I just use packages and a clean Fedora
install. When I'm hacking on upstream code, I completely avoid packages
and use whatever tools (e.g. devstack, virtualenv) other upstream
developers use.

Cheers,
Mark.