Am Freitag, 24. Februar 2006 11:02 schrieb Matthew Grant:> Ralph,Hi Matthew,> I am a Debian Maintainer who is seriously considering getting Xen into > Debian and Ubuntu. > > I have been installing xen-unstable.hg from source on my AMD 64 and have > been impressed with its relative stability. > > I am prepared to sponsor your packages into Debian if we can get them > cleaned up.There is already a project on alioth, called pkg-xen, which exactly tries to do this. We started with my package and have it (more or less) debian-policy compatible now, but some minor things are still to do (afaik). We are already three debian developers/maintainers + two external guys (I am one of them) and have made some real process. If you like you can join this project and help us getting xen3 into debian.> Other things I am looking at are special Xen source trees. We would > need the Debian security team to give us access to a patch repository > for all the Linux security patches. The trick is to get the security > fixes split out from all the other updates that come in the point > releases for the current vanila kernel.org tree. Patching Xen against > the standard Debian kernel tree may be asking for problems, so it is > better to work off a vanilla kernel.org tarball and xen-unstable.hgthis is for example also a topic already discussed on the pkg-xen-devel list. We will supply a patch for a vanilla 2.6.12 (at first) and might also provide binary kernel-images in future (most likely if xen gets merged in the main linux tree). If the xen project releases the next stable version with 2.6.16 we will switch to this version too.> What are your thoughts?My thoughts? Join the alioth-project and help us if you want. We are open to new people that wants to help, so you are very welcome.> Regards, > > Matthew Grantregards, Ralph
Bastian Blank wrote: Hi!> The debian kernel team will maintain xen images with the linux-2.6 > source. I currently prepare both xen 3.0 and unstable packages, which > can be hopefully uploaded today. Maintainer will be the kernel team, as > there are heavy dependencies between xen and the kernel.This is great! In the meantime we are working on uploading xen 3.0 to unstable, and our packages I think are almost ready too! We planned to contact the kernel team after the upload to see how to coordinate, but it's nice to know that the kernel part is being taken care of! :) Our packages don't contain any kernel (we wouldn't have uploaded them without asking the kernel team, of course) but we plan on shipping just the xen patch for a kernel.org kernel, just in case someone preffers running a non-debian kernel: is that OK, or should we remove that from our sources? Guido
On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 04:22:23PM +0100, Guido Trotter wrote:> This is great! In the meantime we are working on uploading xen 3.0 to unstable, > and our packages I think are almost ready too!This is insufficient. Either maintain both 3.0 and unstable or none. In the meantime, the kernel team will maintain both. Bastian -- Extreme feminine beauty is always disturbing. -- Spock, "The Cloud Minders", stardate 5818.4
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 at 03:30:55 -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: Hi!> Bastian Blank, a member of the Debian kernel team, is looking at integrating > XenoLinux builds into the official linux-2.6 package. I think that's a much > better option, and would strongly encourage anyone interested in Xen > packaging to coordinate with the kernel team on this.We will, of course, thanks! Here is an explanation why ha haven't yet!> (Yes, I'm aware there's a pkg-xen maintenance team on alioth as well; but > AFAICT the maintainer of the current xen package is not a member of that > packaging group, and there's no mention of xen on the wnpp bug page -- > what's up with that?)The current Debian Xen package is very old, and also has some policy compliance problems. We (as in: a lot of people who tried) haven't received any answer by the current Xen maintainer about xen status for a long time (as documented in debian bugs #342249 and #271051) so Jeremy Bouse (jbouse@debian.org) has set up a project on alioth and invited people who were interested or maintained unofficial packages to join, which some people (5 of them, as Ralph said) did. After that we've been working on preparing a clean release of Xen 3.0 for sid. We probably should have reported to wnpp and -devel before, sorry! Anyway Jeremy was the one who was going to do so, and he planning to do this soon (AFAIK). We had planned to contact the kernel team, but hadn't yet, as we wanted before to have a working hypervisor in sid (even if that meant that users needed to roll their own kernels) and then see if the kernel team was interested in helping us integrating xen better. (We also had planned contacting the glibc team, at that time, asking them if it could be possible to have a non-segmented glibc in debian for us, but that too was to be done later) Everything that the pkg-xen team did and planned till now can be seen in the public alioth mailing list archives. http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-xen-devel/ and http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-xen-changes/ ! Of course anyone interested in Xen is welcome to join! :) Guido
On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 01:11:35AM +0100, Frederik Schueler wrote: Hi,> I consider team maintainership a good practice for packages of this > complexity, especially considering the amount of work in the bts and on > the userlist xen will probably require. >Apart with the other things in the mail, with which I agree, this might be important: how about a pkg-xen-users@lists.alioth.debian.org ? It might help separating development concerns, todos, etc, from requests for help! ;) Guido