ZOMG WHAT ARE WE BUILDING?!

Josh Boyer jwboyer at fedoraproject.org
Thu Oct 31 13:02:44 UTC 2013


On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 4:30 PM, Joe Brockmeier <jzb at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> (For those who weren't in today's IRC meeting, I sorta apologize for the
> subject line. Sorta.)
>
> As we were discussing today - we need to decide what we are building,
> and (almost as importantly) what we're not building. We've agreed that
> we want to be cooperating with the server SIG, but don't necessarily
> plan to build a foundation for an IaaS ourselves.
>
> Some of the questions that were raised during the meeting:

Note:  I am a cloud newbie.  Please bear with my stupid questions.

> - Should we drop 32-bit?

I was under the impression that 32-bit guests on 64-bit hosts were
fairly common for applications where the advantages of 64-bit address
space isn't needed.  E.g. "64-bit python sucks a lot".  Maybe that's
becoming less of a concern?

> - Should we be targeting ARM?

Now?  Maybe.  In the future?  Probably should, yes.

> - Do we worry about supporting ALL THE METHODS of building the image, or
>   no? (I recommend we focus on One True Way so as not to confuse
>   everyone with 80 different ways they *could* do it.)

So, from a person that doesn't use cloud stuff but might actually want
to try and create an image to make sure I don't break things (kernel
maintenance is fun!), I'd really like one way to make images.  Knowing
all of the images are made one way makes it easier to spin my own to
recreate and then test fixes, etc.  If I have to worry about person X
building one way and something breaking, but person Y building another
way and it works, it's going to drive me crazy.

> Other questions, thoughts, comments, flames?
>
> I also want to recommend that we think hard about not just what we
> build, but accompanying it with appropriate amounts of documentation for
> the developers/users we expect to be consuming the image. I'm sure it
> goes without saying that we would document what we do, but I would like
> to see this thought about each step of the way so that when we get to a
> finished product, it's dead easy to adopt.

Please!  I really want to use more virt/cloudy things myself, but I'm
lost in a sea of acronyms and ever-changing tools.  Probably the
nature of the ecosystem at the moment, but having clear documentation
that a dumb kernel maintainer can read to make shiny things would be
good.

josh


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