Re: [Xen-API] Xapi Project 2.0 release

[Jon Ludlam <jonathan.ludlam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 02/06/14 14:13, George Shuklin wrote:
> I don't want to sound to skeptical, but after about 5 year of deep
> work with xapi, I was really disappointed by Citrix VS opensource
> relationship. XenServer was and is not libre. There is source code but
> there is no way to rebuild original ISO from those sources. Decisions
> were made purely in-house sole by Citrix, and published opensource
> version (xapi packages) were broken beyond repair (and were removed
> from repository).
>
Yes, building the ISO was and still is awkward for non-Citrix people.
This isn't a release of the ISO though, this is just a release of some
of the tools on the ISO, and the biggest focus is on making it work
_properly_ outside the context of XenServer. As Dave mentioned,
buildroot is proof that the source can work in both a Debian-like and
CentOS-like environment.

> Does something really changed here? I see lot of problems in xapi VS
> community relationship and Citrix is kinda not opensource company
> (Presentation Server, World of Windows and so on). Xensource was bit
> unexpected addition to this tight and cozy wold of Citrix and
> Microsoft, and source publication is not made xapi libre software.
> Only 'open source', but not libre.
>
Yes, something has changed. For example, the problem back when we got
xapi into Debian was that we had to get _much_ too involved in the
packaging process - it wasn't simply a case of grabbing the source
tarballs, building and packaging them - it effectively meant that a few
of us had to spend several months making the thing work at all, and
those patches ended up in the debian source package, rotting gently
while the master branch moved on. There was no way back then that xapi
could ever have been packaged up from source by anyone other than us.

This is _very_ different from now. We've spent a long time splitting
repositories up, adding standard build system files, removing hard-coded
paths, splitting things up into more sensible smaller chunks and
generalizing the code. We've split two massive monolithic repositories
(xen-api and xen-api-libs) into about 30 smaller more sensible ones. By
the time of the release, the installation workflow should for these
individual repositories should simply be 'clone from github', then
'configure', 'make', 'make install', and you should be there, and I
think it's entirely reasonable that someone with a working Xen
installation could package it up successfully.

Of course, simply building is not enough. The buildroot repository
demonstrates that, with a minimum of patching (we've still got patches
for xcp-sm, vncterm and opasswd, but these will be fixed before the
release) viable packages can be created that work well enough to run VMs
to OpenStack's satisfaction.

I'm aware that this doesn't address all of your concerns. But I believe
it's a really good first step, and hopefully our next steps will all go
in the same direction too :-)

Jon


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