Hi Thomas, (I've started writing this mail yesterday, before I received all the replies to your mail)
I can understand your frustation. I'm also not happy about how some thing happen in the cloud team. I share your concerns about the over-engineered tool written in python. During our first cloud meeting we selected FAI because it separates code from config (not perfectly), so our users could create their own different config without changing the code. This does not apply to your shell script (a lot of things are hardcoded) and surely not to the big python wrapper around FAI. I would be much happier if we had separated the building process and the upload to the cloud environments into different independent tools. But now we have one big tool doing all. Also the integration into the gitlab CI put some overhead that most users may not need. But it all works and we can produce and upload cloud images. There's still a lot to do (for e.g. we do not sign the shaXXXsums), and I would like to help, but I do not know python and because of the complexity of the overall workflow I've given up to change any code, except for FAI. During the last jitsi meetings I've tried to push forward the support of Openstack things like raw images, keeping less daily and we talked about symlinks for better finding the lastest release. As Noah said, Waldi implemented several things, but there are not yet activated. In https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2021/03/msg00023.html you wrote that if we address the naming you would drop your old images, so I thought that this would be a compromise you can agree. I know that your tool fits much better the needs for creating several customized OpenStack images than FAI and our toolchain can ever do. I do not know which is the better solution for you. Please recheck, if you think you can live with the images build by the new tools, or if you think the OpenStack users would benefit if you would provide the images build by you using your tools. Currently I'm thinking if it would be a (temporary) solution to continue to provide Openstack images also for bullseye in https://cloud.debian.org/cdimage/cloud/OpenStack created by your tool and to see if we manage to move to the FAI/debian-cloud-images toolchain for bookworm. That would give us all some more years to see if the move is possible and if the new tools can produce the images needed by the Openstack users. -- viele Grüße Thomas
