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Re: What to do when DD considers policy to be optional? [kubernetes]



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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