Re: [Xen-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Project Raisin

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 11:16 AM, Stefano Stabellini
<stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> A few weeks ago I started hacking on a new project, consisting in a set
> of bash scripts to build xen-unstable and a few other useful elements.
> It is still in very early stages.
>
> The name of the new project is "Raisin", from Raise Xen, pun intended
> ;-)
> It is a bit like DevStack[1] for Xen: its purpose is to simply and
> quickly retrieve and build Xen and any other related components from
> source, such as Libvirt and Grub2. Optionally it can install and
> configure the system for you. In the future it could also build and
> configure stub domains and driver domains. Another important goal of the
> project is to effectively act as a working guideline on how to setup a
> Xen system, so it is important that the code is easy to read and
> understand. See the README for more information.
>
> With the introduction of Raisin, keeping xen-unstable lightweight, clean
> and well suited for distro packages is going to be easier because we
> won't have to make compromises with the ease of installation from
> source. Raisin is going to take care of setting up a full Xen
> development environment from scratch. As an example, going forward we
> can move the QEMU build from xen-unstable to Raisin, and integrate
> Raisin in OSSTest.
>
> I would like Raisin to work on as many distros as possible. At the
> moment Raisin builds have been tested on Debian and Fedora.
> Installations and system configurations have been tested only on Debian.
>
> I would very much appreciate if anybody with expertise on Fedora, CentOS
> and other distros could help add proper support for them.
>
>
> The code is available here:
>
> git://xenbits.xen.org/people/sstabellini/raisin.git
> http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=people/sstabellini/raisin.git

Hey Stefano!  Looks like a pretty useful package overall.

Some initial feedback:

Automatically installing packages via sudo without asking scares me.

I think "raise" should take commands.  The main way package
prerequisites should be installed, I think, is for raise to give a
list of packages to the user, and the user to "sudo $PACKAGEMANAGER
install $LIST" themselves.

e.g.:
---
$ ./raise check_build_dependencies
Packages required for build:
build-essential libtool autoconf autopoint [...]

Optional packages for additional functionality:
[blah]
---

or (for example)

$ sudo yum install -y $(./raise check_build_dependencies -min -all)

Then the normal way of doing things should be:
* Edit config file
* ./raise check_build_dependencies
* [Install]
* ./raise build
* sudo ./raise install

Other functionality it might be nice to have:
* "build-srcpkg", which will make source rpms/debs
* "build-pkg", which would make installable packages; perhaps with
"install-pkg" which would automatically install them all for you
* "build [component]" -- if you only want to build a single component
(or set of them)

What do you think?

 -George

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xen.org/xen-devel