Xen support without reinventing the wheel

Matthew Palmer mpalmer at hezmatt.org
Thu Nov 10 02:09:21 UTC 2005


On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 07:59:33AM -0500, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
> Matthew Palmer wrote:
> >>>Shouldn't it be enough that *you* are ready to move forward, etc?
> >>do you think I have room for another project?
> >
> ><shrug>  Perhaps.  Your time commitments are your own.
> 
> I deserve that...somewhat.  I would've preferred a more empathetic 
> and/or constructive response given that I do contribute to the 
> open-source ecosystem but at least you gave me one bit of useful 
> information about mentors.

I didn't mean it in a "they're your problem, not mine" sense, but more of a
"you're a better judge of whether you've got enough time to help with
something else than I am".

> >You're going to hold your bug reports to ransom in exchange for somebody 
> >who
> >will teach you how to package stuff?  I suspect that isn't exactly what you
> >meant...
> 
> and certainly isn't what I said.

Well, the use of the word 'exchange' in "I was hoping to leverage somebody
else's knowledge about deb packages etc. exchange for leveraging my
knowledge [about Xen-based systems]." did seem like an invitation to trade,
rather than freely give.  I put it down to differences in writing styles,
but it could certainly have other interpretations.

  Bug reports are relatively low 
> involvement and I certainly do file them in whatever project I have 
> worked with because God knows I find bugs without trying hard.

Don't diss a solid bug report.  You can get me from "huh?" to "aha!" in 3
seconds flat with a good bug report.

> the user community.  What ever I build I want it to be almost failsafe 
> in terms of installation because I don't want end-users to fail and I 
> would rather spend my time pushing new ideas instead of answering the 
> same avoidable questions over and over again.  If I do tackle anything 
> with xen, I don't consider the project done until a user can install a 
> package and have a working environment with a baseline working DomU 
> running without doing anything.
> 
> that's the standard I strive for and sometimes I even succeed.

It's a high standard, but one worth pushing for.

I think we've gotten off the track here a bit, at any rate.  I'm interested
in the larger issues of Xen support in Debian/Ubuntu, but don't have the
time or inclination to hack on it majorly now.  From the lack of public
outbursts regarding our discussion, I think there isn't a large pool of
people just waiting to hack on Xen packaging (unless you've gotten private
replies to your message), so I guess things will lapse back into the swamp
until one of us (or someone else) gets sufficiently irritated by it all to
devote the time to it.

- Matt
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