Hi,
[cc:d Pasi who I know is interested in this too]
As James says, Iâve been investigating what we need to do to make XCP into a âproper open-source projectâ i.e. one where
 Anyone can checkout the source and build it easily
 Anyone can âscratch their own itchâ and contribute code to the community
 We all can collaborate more easily together, without hitting annoying show-stopper problems
The first area Iâd like to fix is building. I am determined to make all of XCP easy to build. Iâve written up a proposal on the xen wiki here:
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Making_XCP_easy_to_build
Iâd really appreciate your feedback on this. I tried to list some of the common âuse casesâ but there are probably more!
I think we need to support multiple ways of building components:
1. The development source packages should just support â./configure && make && make installâ
2. The development source package dependencies should be easy to install (and not conflict with other packages)
3. We should host an up-to-date repo on xenbits.xen.org containing binary snapshot RPMs for early adopters to test via âyum upgradeâ (or âapt-get upgradeâ)
4. We should make our code as portable and as easy to package as possible, to make the lives of upstream distro packagers easier.
Looking at the recent commits I think we are making some progress on making our code more portable: itâs now possible to build the latest master branch of some of our components like âxenopsdâ and âsqueezedâ on âordinaryâ CentOS/Ubuntu/Debian systems. I think Jon Ludlam (cc:d) has been making progress fixing the dependencies of xapi â how far have you got, Jon? Personally Iâm running âxenopsdâ on my Debian unstable laptop and my Ubuntu desktop, which is really nice. Iâd like to run xapi there too (as well as on my XCP hosts)
Let me know what you think!
I think that sorting these problems out is even higher priority than adding new features to XCP â what do you think?
Cheers,
Dave Scott
From: xen-api-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:xen-api-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of James Bulpin
Sent: 28 February 2013 12:48 PM
To: George Shuklin
Cc: xen-api@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Xen-API] how to compile XCP source?
Good input, thanks. I view the library and compiler dependencies as part of the general build environment problem and hence are in scope for the changes we want to make. My aim is that XCP is both âfree as in beerâ and âfree as in speechâ. I want us to get to the point where you can rebuild any XCP component and submit patches back to the project as easily as you could rebuild Postgres and submit patches back to its project. Dave Scott is leading the team here to look at how we do that whilst continuing to produce the commercial products that fund this work â expect to see something from him on this soon.
Regards,
James
--
James Bulpin
Sr Director, Technology, XenServer
Citrix
The main problem is not 'environment out of the box' but the exact versions of libraries, compilers and so on. Because xapi-libs heavily depends on random set of libraries outside the xapi source tree, and there is no way to know witch version to use. Sometimes there is a situation that xapi depends on library foo and bar, and foo (in upstream) depends on different (conflicting) version of bar. And it definitively not compilable on centos5 (because of outdated ocaml for el5)...
To be honest I was strong supporter for xapi. But time flows - XCP 0.5, XCP 1.1, XCP 1.5, XCP 1.6. Every time we found an working ISO with working binaries we can use like 'free version of XenServer'. But no any modification of code was possible (no way to build original ISO, or, at least, original xapi's RPM). That was definitively not a 'free as freedom', just 'open source'. Some minor stuff in /etc/xensource/scripts and /opt/xensource/sm with patches, but no any significant changes was possible. We actually have a huge (over 3k lines) code which simply doing stuff 'around' xapi instead adding that functions to original code.
Now we got XCP 1.6. Again there is a significant set of changes we want to add (and share with others!) - but we can't, and we continue to add 'hacks around'. Really, I not very happy about this and start to thinking about switching to something more 'free as freedom' visualization stack.
Lack of 'scrach your own itch' is very and very disappointing. I really don't want to switch away from xapi and want to see some cooperation...
28.02.2013 15:50, James Bulpin ÐÐÑÐÑ:
> There is no way to reproduce exact build environment without citrix's guys and they are all in XenServer, not in XCP. Details of build environment are closed and without that information disclose you can assume XCP is not opensource, but just 'free'. (sad).
We know this isnât ideal but weâre working on fixing it at the moment. Reproducing the Citrix build environment isnât practical so weâre making XCP/XenServer buildable in a more standard environment. More on this soon.
Cheers,
James
We've tried few times, but gave up.
There is no way to reproduce exact build environment without citrix's guys and they are all in XenServer, not in XCP. Details of build environment are closed and without that information disclose you can assume XCP is not opensource, but just 'free'. (sad).
To be precise: you can build xapi sources from git, but in very strange environment with unknown version of libraries. It will be 'some binary', not the original XCP's xapi.
27.02.2013 19:46, Felix Feng ÐÐÑÐÑ:
And are there any instructions about compiling XCP/XAPI?
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