[Rdo-list] RDO and Upstream Packaging

[Mark McLoughlin]

On Fri, 2015-06-12 at 15:27 +0200, Haïkel wrote:
> Interesting read, that's indeed a breakthrough.
> 
> Usually, when you speak about unified packaging for distro, it's often
> made by upstream maintainers to simplify users life. But it's often inconsistent
> with packaging good pratices and with poor integration.
> 
> Having downstream distros collaborating would fix that long-standing
> issue and gives
> us more weight upstream. Even trivial issue like configuration file
> location could
> be a pain to get it fixed upstream, as upstream maintainers may not
> get the point.
> Having
> 
> I personally prefer having a single unified packaging project to deal
> with common issues and then have sub-teams for each family of distros.
> But unlike RDO, Debian/Ubuntu are a bit less advanced in their tooling, and they
> are eager to get started asap. That's maybe one of the reasons that we may get
> two packaging projects instead of a single one. I still hope it will happen, but
> I'd rather not force a change when we have conflicting priorities.
> 
> Converging RDO/Suse packaging may be a little trickier than Debian/Ubuntu
> but still doable and both party are interested in collaborating.

I'm all about "baby steps".

Collaboration and convergence between RDO/SUSE smells like a fairly
long-term effort to me. If all involved see potential for great stuff
to come out of that, awesome!

However, I really wouldn't like to see a long-term goal like that
getting in the way of progress on something that's just within our
grasp - RDO maintainers using OpenStack infra to maintain trunk
packages for RDO, and even reporting package build results to code
contributors.

As Derek says, the RDO repos could be imported into upstream infra,
Delorean config tweaked, and we've made immediate progress. The next
step would be Jenkins jobs upstream for verifying that packages build.

A good illustration of focusing on "baby steps" is the Ubuntu
maintainers deciding they don't want to proceed with this sort of
shared maintenance with the Debian maintainers:

http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-June/066942.html

Even with the shared Debian/Ubuntu heritage, it sounds like the devil
was in the details.

> On a positive note, we currently have a first external contribution to
> add debian package build
> in Delorean
> https://review.gerrithub.io/#/c/236233/2

Cool!

Mark.