[CentOS-virt] Beta CentOS 7 Xen packages available

On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 11:02 PM, T.Weyergraf <T.Weyergraf at 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