cloud-init: backports, stable updates and collaborative maintenance.

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 02:44:06PM +0100, Vincent Bernat a écrit :
> 
> It is not that a fast-paced environment. To drive its adoption among
> cloud users, Ubuntu frequently backports updates to their version of
> cloud-init to accomodate incompatibilities that may arise. Since the
> initial release of Precise, there have been 22 releases for the
> cloud-init package:
> 
>  http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/c/cloud-init/cloud-init_0.6.3-0ubuntu1.22/changelog

Thanks Vincent for the tip; I had not payed attention.

This said, I doubt I have enough free time to follow Ubuntu's backports.  The
main reasons is that because of divergences between Ubuntu and Debian, there is
no guarantee that a patch on Ubuntu's cloud-init will work on Debian (although
most of them do).

What we are missing here is a set of criteria or tests that define when a
cloud-init package deserves an upload to unstable, a backport, or a request for
a Stable update.  Ideally, the users who have the most stakes in it, in
particular the maintainers of the Debian images on clouds, would help that
process by listing somewhere the functions on which they rely critically, so
that we can collectively organise some throrough testing, especially before a
backport or a Stable upload.

Especially if we maintain a Stable branch, I still hope that we can convince
the Release team to accept updates of cloud-init if they are dilligently tested
and unanimously approved by all the providers of "official" Debian cloud images
using it.  The key point in my opinion is to have a process that can be
reviewed and trusted.

Altogehter, help to maintain the cloud-init package is very welcome.  I would
be pleased to be replaced by somebody who would earn the confidence of the
users and the release team.  (When I started to package cloud-init, I had much
more free time, and now it is more than a year that I even did not have time to
try Debian on the EC2, which is the only public cloud on which I have
experience).

By the way, I am preparing an update of the package, but I take the opportunity
to review all issues in the BTS, so please be patient or contribute to the bug
cleaning :)  I can upload sooner to Experimental if people would like.  Also,
there is always `debcheckout -a cloud-init`, it is on collab-maint...

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan