openstack team mailing list archive

[Justin Santa Barbara <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>
>
>> Are the major and minor numbers going to be sufficient versioning
>>> information? See for example PEP 386 for more detailed version strings (
>>> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0386/).
>>>
>>
>> For a distro, I believe yes.  Do you have a counter-example?
>>
>
> Not off the top of my head, but I really only use RedHat variants or
> Ubuntu variants, so I thought I would bring it up in case there are others
> that use different schemes. For example, how about pre-releases?
>

Good point (and ick!)  I like the PEP 386 / maven idea; non-official
releases get a suffix like "minor=0-SNAPSHOT" or "minor-0-beta1" or
"minor=0-20120401"?



> It seems suboptimal, but I guess it's reasonable to expect the caller of
> the API to be able to provide the distro-specific package name for the
> application or library they want included in the image.
>

I expect the most common use-case is that the caller wants e.g. Debian
Squeeze + a list of packages (openssh-server, mysql-server, nginx,
apache2).  It might see the following images:

#1 has packages: openssh-server
#2 has packages: openssh-server, mysql-server
#3 has packages: openssh-server, mysql-server, nginx, gnome-desktop

Now it could choose #1, in which case it know it needs to install mysql,
nginx + apache2.  It's always better to install #2, which avoids
downloading & installing mysql-server.

#3 may or may not be "better"; the caller may have to uninstall
gnome-desktop to reduce the attack surface area; that may be more expensive
than starting with #2.  I imagine most callers will actually choose an
image which has a strict subset of images; it's simpler.

That raises two issues: should openssh-server be listed (and what about
hypervisor specific packages)?  What do we do about meta-packages (like
gnome-desktop)?

The easy answer here is that the name of every installed package is listed
(as generated by the system package list tool e.g. dpkg).  But that would
be a big list...