Please remove debian folder

[thomasgoirand]

Hi,

As per https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide, please remove the debian folder from the git repository, or move it to a specific branch. As I'm packaging and uploading this software to Debian, your debian folder is annoying me. If you wish to participate to the Debian packaging, please join the alioth.debian.org group to do so instead of packaging on your own.

[2uasimojo]

Thanks for opening this. We're working on it :)

[thomasgoirand]

FYI, the packaging has now moved to:
https://salsa.debian.org/openstack-team/libs/python-pypowervm

This is the new gitlab instance of Debian, which replaces alioth.debian.org. Since that's Gitlab, it is merge request friendly, so I believe it makes it a very good environment for potential contributors (which Alioth was not).

So, no reason to keep your debian folder now... :)

[edmondsw]

@thomasgoirand Some questions below. First not that if we're going to use salsa.debian.org, we'll need to be able to build debs for all pypowervm releases, not just the subset that you've built there for pike (1.1.6) and queens (1.1.10) so far.

I'm trying to figure out how this will work...

1. It looks like the master+dfsg branch on salsa is just a staging ground that removes the debian folder, so if we remove the debian folder that would no longer be needed. Correct?
2. pypowervm is not an openstack project. It is used by OpenStack, but it is also used by other things. So it doesn't really seem to fit under salsa.debian.org/openstack-team. Where could we move this?
3. how do you trigger builds, and where are the resulting debs?
4. possible answer to Test failure under Python 3.6 #2... Could/should we just fixup the debian directory in our github repo and work out a way to upload the resulting debs to wherever you are using in Please remove debian folder #3 instead of using salsa?

[edmondsw]

@thomasgoirand I may have misunderstood your intention with http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2018-February/127410.html but we would definitely still need py2.7 debs for pypowervm.

[thomasgoirand]

Hi,

Sorry for the long answer... :)

First, if you want to take care of the packaging of pypowervm in Debian yourself, I would very much welcome this! I would very much love to have you contribute/handle to the packaging, and I would be pleased to help, review your packaging changes, and sponsor the package upload in Debian. The only thing that I need, is that it doesn't break whatever version of OpenStack is in Debian Sid or Experimental at the time of upload. Doing this probably will take more time for me doing the mentoring / sponsoring uploads than doing it myself, but it's great if we get one more direct contributor to Debian.

Let me attempt to answer now.

1. Yes, the master+dfsg is there to merge every tag we want to release, remove the debian folder, and tag again with +dfsg1 suffix. It's done this way because I'm using a Git tag packaging workflow (which not a lot of people do in Debian, I have to admit).

2. Apart from you, I don't think anyone else is interested into packaging pypowervm in Debian but me and the rest of the OpenStack team. If you want to contribute, I can add you in that specific project within the OpenStack group. If I understand Gitlab well enough, then it should be possible to add you in that Gitlab project, and you wont have access to the rest of the openstack-team group. Though creating a team/group only for one single project (ie: packaging pypowervm) sounds overkill.

3. There's no automated build setup on that project. It should be possible (using Gitlab pipelines), though I haven't done it. The way mostly everyone works in Debian, is using git-buildpackage and sbuild on our own machine (in my laptop for my own case). Upload to Debian is always a manual thing.

4. The main issue with Github is that it is using a non-free software, where as salsa.debian.org is using Gitlab which is free software. You'll find most Debian people not willing to use Github for that reason. As for me, I'm fine with using Github just for doing a few pull requests, but not more, and I prefer to do all of my packaging on completely free platform. Also, salsa.debian.org is the place where to do Debian packaging: it was been brought to life for that only purpose, by and for the Debian community.

The other thing is, with you maintaining a debian folder, and myself maintaining one, we have effectively 2 sources of truth. I don't think it is reasonable to have 2 places to store and maintain the same source code. (I'm not even addressing the fact that there's some issues with your packaging, which I could comment elsewhere)

Last, and that's probably the most important thing. With this last bit, you can just forget about everything else I wrote above. I'm not asking you to completely remove the debian folder, I'm just asking that your master branch doesn't conflict when I merge it on the one for maintaining the package in Debian. There's 2 ways you can achieve this:

• Rename your debian folder as something like debian-upstream. That's probably not best, because one would have to rename it before building the package, but it's ok if you document it.
• Move your debian folder to a different branch, for example debian-ibm-packaging. On each upstream release, you'd simply merge all changes to that branch and modify the version of your debian/changelog so that it matches your upstream release. Again, that could be documented in the README.rst. I would also suggest that your README also points to the Debian packaging in Salsa.

Though really, best would be to directly contribute to Debian (which, if you didn't know, always finally ends up in Ubuntu).

As for the removal of Python 2 support, I'm sorry but yes, this will happen in Debian. And not only for this package, but for mostly everything. We are supposed to remove Python 2 completely from Debian, if you didn't know. And that's not happening in Debian only, this will also happen in Fedora / RHEL. The reason is because upstream Python declared Python 2 as EOL as soon as 2020. Also, one has to realize that Python 3 exists since 2008. That's 10 years ago: more than enough for everyone to do the transition. Why do you think everyone still needs Py 2.7 support? IMO, we can keep Py 2.7 support in Debian for this package if we remove it before Buster is frozen.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)

[edmondsw]

@thomasgoirand putting the rest aside for a moment and just talking about py2 vs py3...

I know py2 is going to go away. The issue here is when. As you said, EOL is in 2020, not 2018. Buster still appears to have py2.7, so I didn't follow your last sentence referencing that. The Debian python policy [1] still says "If an application supports only Python 2, the Python libraries for that application should also be packaged for Python 2" and that case definitely applies here. So I don't think we are ready to drop py2 packaging for pypowervm.

Where have you read that "we are supposed to remove Python 2 completely from Debian", and how do you make that work with [1]?

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/python-policy/ch-python3.html

[thomasgoirand]

Hi.

Can we revisit this issue?

There's multiple ways it can be addressed. The most easy way would be that you release and tag in a generic branch, without packaging. Then, you do your packaging in another branch, specific to packaging, where you're merging the tag. In fact, that's exactly the packaging workflow in Debian.

Also, are you really willing to keep Python 2? I've completely removed it from OpenStack services in Debian already. Buster will be the last release with Py2, and we will be removing Py2 just after that.

[thomasgoirand]

Hi.

I need to insist here. I recently had a quick look at what was done, and I saw that some localization was done in debian/rules that I missed. However, there's python 3.6 hardcoded in debian/rules, which is kind of super ugly. There's no build-dependencies expressed. There's really a room for improvement in your packaging...

Can't we find a way to just work together? The repository on Salsa is wide open for contributions:

https://salsa.debian.org/openstack-team/libs/python-pypowervm

[edmondsw]

@thomasgoirand I would love to help you, but I haven't worked for the org responsible for pypowervm for several years now. I passed this over to @dikonoor when I left. She doesn't work for that org anymore either, but I hope she can put you in touch with the right folks.