[Pacemaker] [RfC] Redesigned Debian HA packages, try 1

Sun Mar 22 17:14:21 UTC 2009

Hi folks,

my name is Martin Loschwitz, I am working for LINBIT, the DRBD upstream
and furthermore I am Debian GNU/Linux Developer. As we use Debian on a
rather large number of systems, i have a fairly vital interest in sane
and well designed packages for openais, pacemaker and heartbeat. This is
why I did the work that I will describe further down in this email, and
this actually also is why I am writing this mail at all.

After numerous consultations with Anabel and Simon, the Debian pacemaker
and heartbeat packages, as well as after consultations with the Debian
Kernel team, that is maintaining OpenAIS at the moment, I redesigned the
way of how OpenAIS, Pacemaker and Heartbeat are packaged in Debian. This
mainly happened to achieve the following goals:

* Make it possible to run pacemaker mostly independant from Heartbeat
* Get a more recent version of OpenAIS into Debian (currently, the only
available version is 0.83, which is a "discontinued development branch").
* Generally improve the situation of Heartbeat, OpenAIS and Pacemaker in
Debian.

In order to achieve better coordtination between the numerous HA-related
packages in Debian, I proposed to Anabel and Simon as well as to Norbert
Tretkowski, Frederik Schüler and Bastian Blank to start a "Debian HA 
Maintainers" group. Up to this point, the DRBD packages are officially
team-maintained by that group with Norbert and me as Uploaders. I hope
that Anabel and Simon will agree to have the Maintainer-Fields of "their"
packages set to the HA-Group as well. An Alioth-project "debian-ha" has
been created for this purpose; it contains an SVN directory that will, if
people agree to cooperate, contain the debian-subdirectories of openais,
pacemaker, heartbeat, and corosync as well. 

'Nuff said about organizational things -- let's start with the real inte-
resting stuff, namely being the packages.

First of all, I created new openais-packages. This has been one of the 
more difficult design decisions -- as already said, the openais-version
in debian is outdated. Meanwhile, the openais-upstream development is in
a quite active state at the moment; openais is a "moving target". Thus,
I decided that it would probably be better to have the "openais"-packages
be the latest upstream version (for corosync-integration later on -- we
will certainly have openais and corosync in Squeeze, aka the next stable
Debian Release, which is due ... somewhen). I went ahead and created a
new set of packages called "openais-legacy". These packages contain the
whitetank-tree and can not live together with the openais-packages on a
system. They are mutually exclusive. They are, however, the base for the
newly designed Heartbeat and Pacemaker packages.

Heartbeat were the next packages to work on. Heartbeat 2.99.x does not
contain the CRM anymore, as that part is now known as Pacemaker. On the
other hand, it is possible to run Pacemaker with OpenAIS and mostly with-
out heartbeat. There was the need to invent a packaging design that would
allow Pacemaker to be built with OpenAIS and yet have the heartbeat-parts
it needs -- without having to install the complete Heartbeat suite. So 
the heartbeat packages got split up into a schema that mostly corresponds
to the way that the SLES people decided to use for their Heartbeat stuff.

Heartbeat is now split up into the following packages:

libheartbeat2
libheartbeat2-dev
heartbeat-common
heartbeat-common-dev
heartbeat
heartbeat-dev
ldirectord

It is possible to install Pacemaker-OpenAIS while only heartbeat-common 
is installed. 

Finally, I also redesigned the pacemaker packages. Before my work, pace-
maker was built both with OpenAIS and heartbeat support. That is nice,
but actually nullifies the idea behind the Heartbeat-split. Thus, I had
to split up the Pacemaker-package into pacemaker-openais and pacemaker-
heartbeat versions. Pacemaker now consists out of the following packages:

openais-heartbeat
openais-heartbeat-dev
openais-pacemaker
openais-pacemaker-dev

The packages are built from one source; the build process actually 
happens twice during the dpkg-buildpackage run.

There are still some things on my todo list. I want to provide an pace-
maker-compability package that provides a smooth upgrade path to the
heartbeat-version. Please keep in mind: These packages are HIGHLY and
ABSOLUTELY and z0mg!!!111 experimental. They are NOT INTENDED for pro-
ductional use; if you are tough anyway and want to help us hunt bugs,
you can do so by adding the following to your sources.list:

deb http://people.debian.org/~madkiss/ha/amd64/ ./

Please report any bugs you see at a first glance -- if Anibal and Simon
agree, I would like to get these packages uploaded to Experimental in
a rather timely manner; additionally, I would like to get versions of
these packages into backports.org as soon as they hit unstable and are
proven to be working.

Thank you for your attention!

Best Regards
M.

--
  .''`.   Martin Loschwitz            Debian GNU/Linux developer
 : :'  :  madkiss at madkiss.org                 madkiss at debian.org
 `. `'`   http://www.madkiss.org/    people.debian.org/~madkiss/
   `-     Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 out now!   http://www.debian.org/