MAAS SRU

[Andres Rodriguez]

Dear Technical Board,

[SUBJECT]
Request an exception to SRU MAAS to both Precise (and its required
dependencies) and Quantal.

(Added for discussion to the agenda)

[PROBLEM]
MAAS in Precise is obsolete and prevents users from having a full
experience of what MAAS is and brings to the deployment of bare metal with
Juju.

When MAAS was first developed, as the successor of Orchestra, it heavily
depended on Cobbler to perform the operations it was designed for. The
first release of MAAS (released in Precise) depended on it (Cobbler) as the
'maas-provision' package. However, due to several concerns about the
maintainship of Cobbler by upstream, as well as some security issues it was
decided that MAAS should drop the usage of Cobbler eventually.

At the time, given that Cobbler implemented far more features than required
by MAAS, Cobbler created various issues when interacting with MAAS itself,
and changes to Cobbler were required in order to ensure a successful user
experience. Because we didn't want to affect the user experience of Cobbler
as a standalone service, we decided to make a simplified copy of it and
created the 'maas-provision' package. This also ensured us that we could
drop 'maas-provision' once MAAS removed it as a dependency.

When we first filed the MIR for MAAS in Precise, the MIR team review
pointed out various issues.  After addressing all but three, we were
granted conditional MIR acceptance. The issues remaining were:

 - Remove Cobbler copy (maas-provision) [1]
 - Remove raphael from MAAS source (and use package) [2]
 - Remove yui3 from MAAS source (and use package) [2]

These issues were resolved, and released in Quantal.  Quantal MAAS no
longer depends on Cobbler (maas-provision), and it now utilizes the JS
libraries from packages in the archive, rather than shipping them along
with MAAS source. Because the new MAAS release dropped the usage of Cobbler
and introduced new features to replace the latter, it was decided not to
SRU MAAS from Quantal to Precise until MAAS matured, and several of the
possible (and actual) issues were resolved. Throughout the Quantal cycle,
the MAAS team and the Ubuntu Server Team worked together to resolve various
issues and make sure that the user experience is great.

Given to the time constraints, some issues were unable to be fixed during
the Quantal cycle;  These are now fixed and included in Raring.  Raring has
a release version of MAAS which contains several fixes to MAAS released in
Quantal.  In order to allow the MAAS team continue the development of MAAS
without affecting the resolution of issues, two upstream branches were
created.

 - lp:maas - Upstream branch that contains the latest features. This is
*NOT* released in Raring.
 - lp:maas/1.2 - Upstream branch containing resolved issues present in
Quantal MAAS. This branch is mainly a bug fix branch of what was released
in Quantal, and is currently released in Raring.

[SOLUTION]
In order for us to ensure that MAAS provides a great user experience, and a
critical bug free software, it is important that we SRU MAAS [3] to both
Quantal and Precise. The SRU involves:

Quantal
=======

For Quantal, the only required package to SRU is the 'maas' source package.

Precise
=======

In order for MAAS to be able to SRU MAAS to Precise, we are also required
to SRU some other packages and fixes. These include:

  Django  [4], [5], [6]
  ---------------------
   - In Order for MAAS to work correctly in Precise, we need to SRU 3 fixes
to Django. These fixes have been fixed in Quantal and in upstream Django.

  yui3 [7], raphael [8]
  ---------------------
   - Given that MAAS no longer includes the YUI3 and raphael JS libraries
in its source, we need to SRU both of these packages to Precise. This
involves SRU'ing two new packages for precise, as their initial release is
Quantal.

  python-tx-tftp [9]
  ------------------
   - This is a new dependency of MAAS (since Quantal), which provides MAAS
with the TFTP server it implements. This package is maintained by the MAAS
team as well as provides upstream fixes to it. This is an essential
dependency of MAAS.

[TESTING]

Testing has been performed by the MAAS team. The MAAS Team commits to the
maintainship of all the packages in question. The testing done includes
both automated testing in the MAAS Lab, as well as manual testing by the
MAAS team.


[1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/maas-provision/+bug/975473
[2]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/maas/+bug/961344
[3]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/maas/+bug/1109283
[4]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python-django/+bug/1081391
[5]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python-django/+bug/1081388
[6]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python-django/+bug/1081392
[7]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/yui3/+bug/1084141
[8]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/raphael/+bug/1084146
[9]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python-tx-tftp/+bug/1109209

-- 
Andres Rodriguez (RoAkSoAx)
Ubuntu Server Developer
Systems Engineer
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/attachments/20130129/88d29f1f/attachment-0001.html>