Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v6 00/11] libxl: ocaml: improve the bindings

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 2:34 PM, David Scott <dave.scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 10/12/13 14:10, George Dunlap wrote:
>>
>> On 12/10/2013 01:20 PM, Ian Campbell wrote:
>>> I think the arguments made there still stand, in short it would be
>>> awesome if xapi could move to using libxl on top of 4.4 and the risks
>>> are almost entirely contained within this use case, which cannot be
>>> satisfied by the code as it stands today.
>>
>>
>> Except that that basically calls into question what a "code freeze" is
>> at all.  At some point we just need to say, "No more, this is what we
>> have; from now on we work on bug fixes."
>>
>> We've decided that PVH dom0 and ARM "physical address space leak" fixes
>> are blockers for strategic reasons.  Is there a good reason that we
>> should consider updated OCaml bindings in the same light?
>>
>> At this point, the fact that there is only one downstream user
>> (XenServer) is an argument *against* its inclusion: there is very little
>> benefit, as XS can simply carry the patches if they want to.
>
>
> A nit-pick:

Not exactly. ;-)

> the downstream user is really 'xenopsd', part of the xapi
> project. The xapi/xenopsd code is in XenServer and, increasingly, available
> for other Linux distros (we're trying to do the right thing and make the
> code easy to package). XenServer could easily carry some patches, but the
> other distros probably won't. The only workarounds to keep xapi/xenopsd
> working on non-XenServer distros that I can think of are (i) not using libxl
> at all [a shame, obviously]; or (ii) depending on a fresh package,
> 'libxl-ocaml-bindings-fixed' which would be a fork of the in-tree code with
> the fixes applied and named 'xenlight2' [ugly, not totally sure if it's even
> possible]. It seems odd to me to decide to ship code which the only user
> can't actually use ;-)

Right -- so you are arguing that there is in fact a strategic reason
to get this into 4.4: you want xapi to be able to be easy to package
and install into distros, and having broken ocaml bindings is a major
blocker for that.  xapi packages for distros are already in a pretty
dire state, and not having support until 4.5 could be disastrous.

Would you agree with that assessment?

 -George

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