Re: What to do when DD considers policy to be optional? [kubernetes]
On 4/8/20 11:25 PM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> On 2020-04-08 22:36:17 +0200 (+0200), Thomas Goirand wrote:
> [...]
>> Also, the docker world is not the only one to be this way. It used to be
>> like this in OpenStack too. In the OpenStack world, they haven't changed
>> the way they release (ie: every 6 months), but the user survey has shown
>> that almost every user is lagging 4 or 5 versions behind, because
>> upgrading the infrastructure is both difficult and time consuming. Over
>> time, they became very helpful for back-porting fixes to EOL versions too.
>>
>> The main issue is that upstream wants to be able to do fast development,
>> and focus on the development rather than on their users. Taking care of
>> a long term release is time consuming. Taking care of multiple old
>> release is very annoying (backporting fixes may not be always obvious).
>>
>> So yeah, probably upstream will reply with "Debian is stupid". Let them
>> say it if they want to: that doesn't make them right. It only shows they
>> are completely ignorant of what their users want, and the need of
>> downstream distributions.
>>
>> The more there's going to be users going at them asking them about a 2
>> year old release, the more they will realize that Debian isn't stupid,
>> and that this is the way the final users want to consume their work. So
>> it's good for us, and beneficial to the project. It's doing our users a
>> favor, and it doesn't hurt us.
> [...]
>
> To be fair, the OpenStack community as a whole never suggested it
> was stupid for distros to carry older versions of the software (many
> folks there have experience packaging for and in LTS GNU/Linux
> distributions too, so understand the pain). What was said is that
> it's hard to find enough people with sufficient time to maintain
> years-old versions of the software, thus the community looks to the
> distributions' package maintainers to help shoulder some of that
> burden, coordinate with each other on backporting fixes they need to
> the versions they're carrying, and so on. What has typically been
> laughed off as impractical is suggestions like not developing as
> much software so quickly.
>
> The OpenStack community also doesn't tell users who have questions
> about 2+ year old versions of the software to go away until they
> upgrade to the bleeding edge. However, it's only natural that if
> users ask questions about old tech, they may find that the number of
> folks still around who remember how it worked (beyond what's already
> in the older versions of the software's documentation) will be
> vanishingly small.
Jeremy,
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.
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 by the way completely understand that the need for more people
maintaining older releases of OpenStack (and the CI that goes with it)
has never been fixed, and probably never will, unless a big corp like
Red Hat puts serious resources on it, which would be the only serious
way to maintain an OpenStack LTS.
I don't know the Kubernets community, but probably they are facing the
same difficulties (ie: the lack of resources to maintain older versions).
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
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