OpenStack 2013.2~rc1, aka Havana, fully available in Debian Experimental

Announcement

After a very long work, over the course of 4 months, I have finished packaging the first RC1 of OpenStack. This comes on time, just 9 days before the official Havana release. Please do try this RC1 before the official 2013.2, code name Havana, is released, and hopefully uploaded to Debian. All of the packages are available from Debian Experimental, keeping Grizzly in Sid. However, there is also some private repositories that I maintain, holding Wheezy backports:

deb http://havana.pkgs.enovance.com/debian havana main

deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian havana-backports main

The first repository holds the packages maintained within the Alioth group. These are built directly from my Jenkins machine, on each git push. The 2nd repository is holding backports from Sid to Wheezy for the packages that I don’t actively maintain (though a lot of them are in the Python module team, in which I do a lot of packaging and updates as well).

A few numbers

A few numbers about this now. I had to work on 145 source packages: at least backport them to Wheezy, and push them in the GPLHost archive repository above. This generates 360 binary packages. Out of these, I maintain 77 source packages within the Alioth OpenStack group, generating 209 .deb files. That’s a lot of stuff to deal with (and I feel sometimes a bit dizzy about it). While OpenStack is a big jigsaw puzzle to solve for the users, it is even more for someone who has to deal with all the (sometimes buried in the the code) Python dependencies. I hope others will come and join me in this packaging effort, since over the time, there’s more and more work to be done, as the project grows. Note that most of the work is unfortunately done on packaging (and updating) the Python dependencies, working on the packages themselves is done last, at the end of the cycle.

Other things not packaged (yet)

Before the release (and the forthcoming Hongkong summit on the 5th of November), I hope to be able to finish packaging TripleO. TripleO is in fact OpenStack on OpenStack, which works with nova-baremetal. I have no idea how to test or install this, though it sounds like a lot of fun. There are 6 source packages that need to be done. Also, pending on the FTP masters NEW queue, is Trove: Database as a Service. I hope this one can get through soon. There is, also, Marconi, which is an incubated project for a new message queuing service, which probably will replace RabbitMQ (I’m not sure yet what it does, and I will be happy to hear about it at the summit). Lastly, there’s Ironic, which will at some point, replace nova-baremetal. That is, it does cloud computing over bare metal, without virtualization.

All of these new projects are still in an incubation stage, and are not part of the official release yet. Though, I have learned over the course of this past year, that with OpenStack, it’s never early enough to start the packaging work.

Thanks to my sponsor!

Please note that all of this wouldn’t be possible without eNovance sponsoring my packaging work. A big up to all of them for supporting and loving Debian! You guys rox. Also a special thanks to Mehdi / Sileth, for his work testing everything with the Tempest functional tests and the CI platform.