Good morning,

> ​Hi Martin,
> 
> While I highly appreciate syseleven work for creating and maintaining 
> packages let's observe that each company is trying to be independent.
> 

Following that same logic, I assume you're running your production systems
with LinuxFromScratch?

> Creating packages on their own is actually the best way to get most familiar 
> with the source code and dependencies and IMHO it is actually a great 
> technical excercise when you seriously think about using (Open)Contrail in 
> production.
> 

I am not blaming anyone for building a separate set of packages (who am I
anyway?). I'm just asking if it makes sense to have the fragmentation that
we currently see with regards to package builders. SysEleven has invested
at least half a year of FTE into bringing the packages into the shape they
currently have, and other companies might not be too eager to go through
that same experience to re-invent the wheel.

I am, however, challenging your statement of building Contrail packages as
a "technical exercise", at least if the goal is to run the packages in 
production.

Having been [email protected] for more than 12 years now, I have come
to think that the main motivation behind providing pre-packaged software is
to supply users with packages that meet a basic set of standards. Ubuntu
and Debian both have established a number of rulesets to implement this set
of standards, with the Debian Policy being the fundament of these rules. In
fact, there are not so many ways to build Contrail packages that comply with
the aforementioned ruleset. The FHS, which comes pickaback with the
Debian policy, is pretty strict about which files need to go where, and the
Debian policy itself is pretty strict about how individual files need to be put
into packages and how certain affairs need to be dealt with to be compliant.

In my opinion, and i have expressed this numerous times, the best approach
would be to have packages provided by Debian and/or Ubuntu that guarantee
a certain level of standard compliance. Companies could still use these as a
base for their packages if, for whatever reason, they decide to need separate
packages. Right now, having these packages is next to impossible mainly for
two reasons:

* The official upstream packages contain several hundreds of warnings and
errors according to the Debian policy compliance checker, Lintian (or at least
that was the case when I looked the last time -- the situation may be better by
now)

* The official upstream *source* does things that will never ever be able to be
brought into accordance with the Debian policy (such as the third_party-
nightmare or the decision to no longer support upstart and instead introduce
a separate init management tool, which isn't even systemd, albeit literally 
every
other enterprise distribution is switching to systemd).

Don't get me wrong. If there is serious interest in starting to build packages
for the official Debian and Ubuntu archives as a team, I am more than willing
to help -- with technical expertise as well with uploads right into Debian. With
the current state of upstream, though, this is going to be less than fun (and it
would require coordinating with a number of other package maintainers whose
packages need to be monkey-patched to be compliant with Contrail in its
current form).

If there is no interest, then by all means, let's keep companies reinventing the
wheel every other month.

> Cheers,
> R.
> ​

Best regards
Martin

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