openstack team mailing list archive

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:06:46PM +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In devstack, we currently have two separate lists of packages to
> install: one for Ubuntu (in files/apts/) and one for Fedora (in
> files/rpms/).
> 
> This has two issues:
> 
>  - this leads to incomplete updates for dependencies. It happens that
>    someone updates the apts files but not the rpms ones. (shameless
>    plug: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/8475/ needs some review love)
> 
>  - this just doesn't scale when adding support for another distro,
>    especially as rpm-based distros don't all share the same package
>    names (hence files/rpms/ cannot really be shared).
> 
> I'd like us to move to a new scheme where we have one list of packages
> (say the Ubuntu one, for instance) and instead of adding another one
> Fedora, openSUSE, etc., we have translation tables to map package names
> from Ubuntu to other distros.
> 
> Supporting a new distro is then a matter of adding a translation table
> (+ hacking the code to change the right config files, obviously), and we
> can easily add tests to make sure the translation tables contain a
> mapping for each package (and therefore fix the first issue).
> 
> I already have some working code for that, but I want to check if people
> are fine with the idea before submitting it for review.

I've nothing against your proposal & certainly the motivation is
good, but thought I'd throw out an alternative idea just in case

Instead of having one sub-dir per package/distro, just have a
single (CSV/JSON/XML/whatever) file listing all distros in the
same place

eg a CSV file where the first column is the generic name, and
other columns are the distro-specific names (if required). The
distro specific column would be empty if the generic name applied
without change, or '-' if the package was not applicable to the
distro at all.

  # cat nova.csv
  Package,Ubuntu,Fedora,RHEL,SUSE
  python-devel,,,,,,
  libvirt,libvirt-bin,,,,,
  dnsmasq-base,,-,-,,
  dnsmasq-utils,,,,,,,

Hmm, using JSON would actually be a bit more readable.

The core idea is to have all the data, both the master list and
distro mappings in one clear place.

Regards,
Daniel
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