On 09/08/2015 01:02 PM, George Dunlap wrote: > 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. See my comments inline as appropriate > 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. Cool. Good to know. Well, while I have been using CentOS for several years now in both private and professional setups, I have to admit, that so far I did not delve into the community itself and make myself familiar with its processes and procedures. It might be time to change that :) > > 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. :-) Well, first of all congrats to your recent marriage! I know what your were up to lately, as I did the same some 6+ years ago. And much like you, I have to dedicate my personal free-time to any effort. On the plus side, I am a sysadmin actually using Xen4CentOS on top of CentOS 6 in a professional production environment, spanning 50 virtualisation hosts and running over 600 VMs (over 1,500 pCPUs over 10Tbytes RAM). So I get pretty much of an impression, what it means to actually use Xen4CentOS. > > * 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". You already found out in another post, that I actually did test the CentOS 7 packages early in july and reported to the list. That lack of any response on my report triggered me to do Xen 4 on CentOS7 packages myself. > > 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.) See above. > > 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. Well, I'd be happy to help. I can easily test things out on my private setup, which is all geared towards Xen and virtualisation anyway, so I am all setup. To actually contribute, I would ideally like some git-repo to checkout, to prep patches against. Those patches, I could send to you for review. If there is some process aligned to "the CentOS way of doing things", I would need a pointer to some docs to make myself familiar with. As I have not the faintest clue about what it takes to actually maintain a package, i am - at least now - the inappropriate person. > > 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. Yeah, saw that yesterday in the repo. Ok then, I will fetch it soon and start testing it in one of my CentOS-7 Xen guests (I run nested-Xen). If that test succeeds, I could update the host. That way, these packages would get some real-world test, running my zoo of guests. Oviously, I'll report my findings. I would propose to see, if that yields anything useful to the development of the Xen4CentOS 7 packages. To actually look into code, I'll fetch the source-packages of that repo. > > 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. I popped in late, close to closure of the meeting. I resorted to readonly, as I wanted to grasp the "style" and scope of the things communicated. Unfortunately, being located in Germany means, that this time collides with my work-hours and if I can allocate some time to attend remains to be seen. > > -George > _______________________________________________ > CentOS-virt mailing list > CentOS-virt at centos.org > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt Regards, Thomas