I have finished preparing the beta 2 of the next release of OpenStack. It is currently only available from out Git on Alioth (in /git/openstack), and directly from my jenkins repository, which creates Wheezy backports for it:
deb ftp://havana.pkgs.enovance.com/debian havana main deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian havana-backports main
As for every OpenStack release, a large number of Python modules needed to be packaged and are waiting in the FTP master NEW queue to be approved: oslo-sphinx, python-django-discover-runner, python-hacking, python-jsonrpclib, python-lesscpy, python-neutronclient, python-nosehtmloutput, python-requestbuilder, python-termcolor, sphinxcontrib-httpdomain and sphinxcontrib-pecanwsme. Let’s hope that they will be approved before the next beta release in september (time where OpenStack Havana will be in feature freeze). The total number of packages maintained by the OpenStack team (on which I really am the only active maintainer for the moment…), there’s 53 packages, plus these 11 packages waiting in the NEW queue. That’s a big number of package, and I wouldn’t mind some help…
One thing that annoyed all the community is that Quantum, the OpenStack network virtualization module, had to be renamed as Neutron, because of a trademark from Quantum (you probably remember the Quantum Fireball hard drives? Well, it’s the same company…).
Another good news is that my openstack-debian-images package has just been approved and landed in Sid. With it, you can automate the process of building a Debian image for OpenStack with a simple shell command (there’s a man page that I wrote with it: read it if you need to build images). It is made of a single shell script to build the image, using kpartx, parted, mbr, debootstrap, extlinux and friends. I tried to keep it simple, not involving a huge amount of components.
With the release of cloud-init 0.7.2-3, I have fixed a few bugs (3 important bugs, out of which 2 where RC bugs), thanks to contributions in the debian-cloud@lists.debian.org mailing list. This includes adding new init.d scripts, so we now have support for user data. This doesn’t only benefits OpenStack images, but anyone willing to start virtual machines in the cloud (nowadays, every cloud implementation needs cloud-init installed in the virtual images). This means you can include a script in the metadata of the virtual machine you start it, and it will be executed at startup. If everything goes as planned (that is, no new RC bug), I will upload an update of cloud-init to backports in 5 days (there is already a version there, but it doesn’t have the necessary init.d scripts to execute the user data scripts), and openstack-debian-images in 9 days. Then it will be possible to build OpenStack images with absolutely all the tools available from Wheezy (and backports). I hope to be able to discuss that during Debconf 13.