On 2020-04-09 09:42:28 +0200 (+0200), Thomas Goirand wrote: [...] > I agree with all what you wrote above. However, there's still no > LTS release in OpenStack, unfortunately. I can support Debian > stable, though I have (understandably) given up on oldstable, yet > even on Debian LTS.
Yep, at the moment it's running around the 3-year mark where the community ceases to be able to maintain extensive integration testing any longer (the Ocata release from early 2017 is at the point where it's falling apart now CI-wise). This fluctuates a bit though, for example I anticipate an interest in expiring releases prior to the current one a bit faster because it will mean not having to continue supporting Python 2.7 within the test infrastructure for as long. > Also, it used not to be the way you described. The OpenStack > community has evolved from operators like Rackspace proudly > advertising they deploy from master, to something more reasonable. > It is currently widely accepted that running older releases of > OpenStack is actually OK, and that upgrades aren't easy. [...] I don't think that goal has gone away entirely. Some public providers are basically deploying from master or at least upgrading to the released versions by/on release day (I'm a happy customer of one of them and they even use Debian, though I think they're deploying from source with Ansible so not using the OpenStack packages you're maintaining). On the other hand, upgrades have become far easier for users/operators than they used to be, with most of the deployment automation projects now performing system-wide upgrade tests on every proposed change, stable branch policies limiting what sorts of configuration transitions are allowable between releases, and so on. I get that the software is still changing far faster than is comfortable for LTS GNU/Linux distribution release cadences, and more recent improvements like support for "fast-forward" upgrades to get between noncontiguous major releases are only a half measure. I still hold out hope that as the software matures (it's only 10 years old now, which is relatively young compared to other ecosystems its size), things will continue to stabilize and become more viable in traditional distro packaging realms. The work you're doing to keep up with it in Debian is massive, and I can't thank you enough for that. Please do know that it's greatly appreciated! The Kubernetes community is roughly 5 years behind OpenStack, so they're just now bumping up against the challenges the OpenStack community ran into circa 2015, and much like many of OpenStack's struggles stem from challenges with Python software management, Kubernetes is running into different problems with their choice of programming language. Python was 15-16 years old when OpenStack started, while Golang was only 5-6 years old when Kubernetes began. In some ways this was a benefit to the Kubernetes community as it allowed their work to help shape the language (not to say that OpenStack hasn't had a significant impact on Python as well), but with that also comes the joys of trying to maintain a very large project in a rapidly-evolving language. -- Jeremy Stanley
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