juju-core on i386

[William Reade]

On Fri, 2013-04-19 at 21:42 +1000, David Cheney wrote:
> > Do we have 32-bit binaries for Mongo as well? The other limiter is
> > that the client defaults the target to the same architecture, and at
> > least until now you couldn't run a 32-bit state server.

Not any more: target selection should be entirely determined by the
available tools (which are then used to filter reasonable images).

> Mongo is not needed on the client. We do have mongodb-server binaries
> for 386 state servers. However, all state servers are hard coded to use
> a amd64 image (I just checked, William says this is true)

I clearly fail at communication.

If, on EC2, after all constraints etc have been applied, there's still a
choice of arches available, we default to amd64. But if we only had i386
tools, or if we specified arch=i386 in constraints, it should work fine.

Openstack currently assumes that the default-image-id is precise/amd64,
so it'll refuse to bootstrap/startinstance if suitable tools for that
image aren't available (eg if you've uploaded tools from i386). This
will be resolved once clouddata handling lands (which won't be long, I
hope).

MAAS currently picks an arbitrary arch from those available, which has
been working by coincidence, but will not do so forever. Fixing this is
not challenging but has not yet been done.

ISTM that, despite the spotty support in practice, we should make i386
tools available across the board: I don't think it will make anyone's
experience any worse, and it'll make some peoples' better.

Dissent?

Cheers
William