Interim plan to move away from the mongo tarball

[Clint Byrum]

Excerpts from Gustavo Niemeyer's message of 2013-03-26 07:50:19 -0700:
> On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 11:26 AM, James Page <james.page at canonical.com> wrote:
> > The agreed version of MongoDB (currently 2.2.3) will be backported to
> > precise and quantal; its still not in main so fixes right now would be
> > driven through the Ubuntu server team (rather than from security team
> > for example) - but they should be fixes, not upgrades :-).  I'm hoping
> 
> That's exactly my concern. So what's the plan to maintain a single
> version across all of the releases?  Let's say we want to use 2.4 by
> 13.10.. how will we get 2.4 into Precise?
> 
> > I think this is fine; looking at the simplicity of the mongodb upstart
> > script you should be able to maintain a separate mongodb configuration
> > and data directories for Juju.  That way you take the compiled
> > binaries from the package (with all the goodness that gets you re
> > security updates etc..) and the configuration etc is outside of the
> > package and not touched.
> >
> > This also allows you to restart the juju mongodb when you want to,
> > rather than when apt upgrades the package.  This is kinda what ceph
> > does automatically - the package installs the binaries, its up to the
> > admin to restart the services.
> 
> Both of these sound like a good idea.
> 
> >> The long term maintenance also feels tricky. We won't be able to
> >> use a new MongoDB release without retrofitting the package into
> >> all supported releases, which extends for a period of 5 years in
> >> LTSes.
> >
> > Backporting of new versions well help this but realistically after 2-3
> > years of an LTS I suspect most Juju users will be running on the next
> > LTS anyway; so we should probably be agreeing some sort of two year
> > fix on MongoDB version at 14.04.
> 
> It's not clear to me what this means. The LTS has a lifespan of 5
> years. I believe we should support this, which means that the release
> of MongoDB we use 4.5 years after the LTS was released must still run
> on that LTS.

It seems unwise to couple Juju's backward support window to the OS
support window.

Lucid is still supported, but nobody expects juju to work on lucid.