On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 11:02 PM, T.Weyergraf T.Weyergraf@virtfinity.de wrote:
First of all, I fully agree, that forked repos are undesirable. However, to the casual observer (like me), there are hardly any ressources for Xen on CentOS 7. There are some beta packages, as announced in the start if this thread, with the latest update being 4.4.2 on 4th of august. I have not yet found any git repo to check out the current Xen 4 CentOS 7 development effort - only the source rpms to the above packages could be used. Likewise, the response on the list on the announcements of the Xen on CentOS 7 beta packages was kind of mute and no further updates were given. This led me to the - apparently false - assumption, that the project kind of fell asleep. I'd be more than happy to at least test development packages and give feedback.
Your statement "These RPMs are produced by Citrix, so we need to get the right" irritates me, as I was completely unaware of any "rights" from Citrix to be waited for.
Anyway, I will wait for the official Xen4CentOS packages for CentOS 7 and keep my stuff out of the public to avoid useless forks.
So actually, the SIGs are supposed to be community efforts -- and my long term hope was that once the SIG was "jump-started", that community members would step up to take over -- or at least step up to help significantly.
A number of reasons C7 has "stalled":
* Lack of time on my part. I only work 4 days a week for Citrix, and I have significant other duties. Normally I can only spend a day or so a week on CentOS stuff; and in particular, the review load relating to the 4.6 feature freeze (beginning of July) was very high. Then I got married and went on holiday for 3 weeks in August, which also didn't help. :-)
* Apparent lack of testing by the community. About a month after the C7 "beta", I was about to announce an actual release, when I happened to discover that HVM guests wouldn't boot -- not under any configuration. This is really basic core functionality that nobody at all had tested (or if they had they hadn't complained). This convinced me that I couldn't rely on community testing, and prompted me to spend some time writing an automated test suite that would at least do a basic smoke-test for a number of configurations. I've got this working for the core xen package, but I was planning on extending it to libvirt before declaring CentOS 7 "ready".
I'm sorry I haven't been very pro-active about pushing to the xen package repository -- I didn't know anyone was looking. (If you asked about it, then I must have missed it.)
I would be happy to have help improving the packages. I would be *very* happy to have help maintaining the Xen4CentOS packages, and I would be *delighted* if someone wanted to take over maintainership of the packages entirely.
FYI I have just finished rebasing things to 4.6-rc2 (there are packages in virt7-xen-46-candidate now), and am in the process of switching things over to systemd.
The Virt SIG has IRC meetings on freenode channel #centos-devel every two weeks -- the next one is today (8 September) at 2pm BST (3pm UTC). If anyone wants to help contribute / see what the status of Xen4CentOS is, feel free to pop in.
-George