Re: Unsing stable-backports as an ugprade path to stable+1

[Kees Meijs | Nefos <kees@nefos.nl>]

Hi,

Proud and happy Debian user here, also using Ceph (and OpenStack, that is.)

We operate a systems landscape based on Debian because of stability and 
predictability. An upgrade path is an absolute must for us. Doing a 
little sidestep via either Backports or Fasttrack is an option, although 
it shouldn't be too complicated to figure out each and every package 
version. Should it come from stable, or something different...?

Anyway, I only wanted to point out there's actual users out there. The 
discussion and problem to be solved is not theoretical only, at all. 
We're talking about real life production systems.

Thanks for all the good and hard work so far. I'll follow the discussion 
further in silence and good faith.

Cheers,
Kees

P.S. Thomas: it's that I don't know how you look like; we might have 
bumped into each other at FOSDEM at the time. :-)

On 24-01-2022 15:21, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> On 1/23/22 21:43, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:
> > On Thu, 2022-01-20 at 00:12 +0100, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> > > Try to talk to upstream. Perhaps it’s possible to (at least locally
> > > to the Debian packaging) support the extended upgrade path.
> >
> > I think that was tried, just not sure what the outcome was.
>
> I tried talking with Sage (who's kind of the lead in Ceph) during 
> FOSDEM in 2019, after his talk, and he seemed supportive, but said he 
> should raised the concern in the Ceph community. Perhaps it's worth 
> trying to raise the topic again in the Ceph devel list again.
>
> > > (And incidentally, the Derivate-that-must-not-be-named
> > > since their LTS releases also don’t permit skipping, come out at about
> > > the same frequency as stable Debian releases, [....]
> >
> > U* is one question, the other one is how RedHat is supporting Ceph 
> > and how
> > their upgrade path looks. Although they are a bit more flexible I 
> > guess as
> > they have their own ceph repositories and support ceph over different
> > releases.
> >
> > Maybe Debian (finally) needs to add support for per-package 
> > repositories,
> > too. Ceph is not the only part of Debian where something like that 
> > would make
> > sense, although that discussion is not for this list.
>
> Correct. And that's probably the path I will choose as well: yet 
> another unofficial Debian repository in the debian.net namespace, for 
> people to use as upgrade path. I'm doing this for OpenStack, maybe 
> there's no other choice for Ceph for the moment. It's IMO less nice 
> than using stable-backports, but no choice, if that's not allowed... 
> If not an idea solution, that's IMO a better choice than leaving 
> Debian users using a bitrotted version that's 2 releases behind.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Thomas Goirand (zigo)