To: Debian xen and kernel team list, Ian Jackson Cc: Stefan Bader, maintainer of xen packages in Ubuntu
Hi all, Short version: Hi! I'd like to help with the Xen packaging in Debian. Long version: Q: Who are you? How are you related to Debian an the Xen project? A: Hi, I'm Hans van Kranenburg, nickname Knorrie, I live in the Netherlands. I'm a Debian user since 2002, and have been using Debian and Xen at work (Mendix) since 2006, which has grown from a handful dom0s with 4GiB memory each to a bunch of clusters with let's say somewhere between 10TiB and 20TiB of physical memory in the dom0s together, running a production environment for customer application hosting. My general interests are filesystems and networking and I like programming in Python. At work, we've been maintaining our own debian repository for many years, with our own packages, changed Debian packages and custom backports, which caused me to pick up some Debian packaging skills along the way. Q: And why the sudden interest? A: Some problems we ran into in the last year+ caused me to have a better look at the Xen releases and the packages in Debian. The situation I ran into is best described as: "Wait... I'm running a Xen version from Debian Stable (at the time of realizing that's Jessie) that was released before the type of hardware I have here was invented and manufactured, it's out of support and out of security support upstream and I'm surprised weird things are going on?" Maybe we should reverse this a bit and see if we can keep up to date with Xen stable releases that know about certain quirks of the hardware. The sad part is that I quickly discovered the xen packages aren't really actively maintained in Debian. Luckily we got a newer version in Stretch just before the freeze and currently Ian Jackson is keeping everything on life support (thanks!!). Current packaging is not tracked in version control (well, not on a level of granularity that I would deem acceptable) and the contents are being changed based on unpacking the previous upload and changing old generated files in place, disregarding the way how the package was set up in the past (which is quite similar to how the linux kernel packaging for Debian works). Q: So, let's sit in a corner and cry? A: No, we can do better. A few days ago I started reaching out to see if I could find members of the Xen team and ended up talking to Ian Jackson in #debian-kernel. He encouraged me to take a further look and was immediately available to help and answer any questions I would have. What I did in the last few days is basically clean up the packaging to get it back to a state where it's usable again. So, move the packaging back to git, import the latest release and then fix enough things to be able to at least produce new security updates for Stretch and get a newer package into unstable. I uploaded the work it to github [0] for now. It can be moved anywhere else later. I tend to write things in commit messages, so please have a look. Besides preparing a new version for stretch-security as an example, I moved the packaging forward to Xen 4.9, by taking the relevant changes done by Stefan Bader in Ubuntu (thanks!!) and merge them back into the packaging. I (smoke)tested the resulting packages in my test environment at work. To be able to properly test I put them in a repository at [1]. Note that I'm not a Debian Maintainer (yet). I do have packages in Debian with my work on btrfs, the uploads are sponsored by Adam Borowski. [2] I guess that it'd be good to finally take the step to apply for Debian Maintainer status when starting to work on low level security sensitive packages like this. Luckily, we have a Debian keysigning party in the next days in The Netherlands, so I have a quick opportinity to get things in order. :] I have already identified quite a few topics I'd like to discuss next, but, let's take it one step at a time, I typed enough already here. :) Regards, Hans van Kranenburg [0] https://github.com/knorrie/debian-xen/ [1] https://packages.knorrie.org/xen/debian/pool/main/x/xen/ [2] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=hans%40knorrie.org
