Re: Status GCE images and trademark (was Please let's not talk about "clouds")
[Adding my colleague to the thread]
Hi Yaroslav,
On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Yaroslav Halchenko <yoh@debian.org> wrote:
> Hi Jimmy,
>
> Congrats on the launch! I have a little comment regarding one of your previous
> posts where I got surprised that noone seems have expressed a similar line of
> thought:
>
> On Mon, 22 Apr 2013, Jimmy Kaplowitz wrote:
>> 2) As I understand it, people in Debian are already packaging
>> build-debian-cloud (f/k/a ec2debian-build-ami) for jessie. This is great.
>> While gcutil and gsutil are free software, the pace of development is such
>> that more thought is probably warranted on what the ideal situation is for
>> their packaging and where such packaging would live. If David and/or I
>> make it to DebConf13, this could be one of many fruitful topics of
>> discussion. As with point 1, we're hoping to publicize these quite soon,
>> so any packaging would necessarily happen some time after we properly
>> announce these and gain users, not before.
>
> to me it reads like:
>
> we first release a car with a square steering wheel and when we announce
> this new model and gain new users we will make it easier for them by making it
> round...
>
> gcutil's Changelog suggests that it had been in development/release for a
> while:
>
> $> grep release CHANGELOG
> Release 1.8.0 (release date: 2013-05-15):
> Release 1.7.2 (release date: 2013-03-11):
> ...
> Release 1.2.0 (release date: 2012-08-28):
>
> and I really see only disadvantages of having no publicly available (preferably
> in Debian proper) Debian packages of the tool. It could have been blocked from
> propagating into jessie if you care not to have a "releasable" version.
>
> so really -- why not have it packaged and uploaded (like yesterday)?
All of us see disadvantages to the status quo, no disagreement there.
I'll use a similar analogy to yours - the situation is more like
fitting a square peg into a round hole, but to correct the shape of
the peg, we have to figure out how to round the edges without damaging
it.
Less metaphorically, there are technical, release engineering, and
cultural issues to figure out to do this right (I'm the only one
closely involved with this effort who comes from a Debian community
background and the typical concerns and workflow of a company are
quite different). Everyone involved wants to resolve these issues,
happily, and doing so is a core reason one or two of them will be
joining me at DebConf this year. Their basic reason for attending is
to figure out how to collaborate best with Debian, very much including
packaging issues.
So, the summary is, "you make a good point, to which the resolution
will need a bit more back-and-forth, but we're all interested in
getting there."
One thing to note in the meantime: the main thing missing is Debian
packages, not public releases or source code. For gcutil that's all
available via https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine-tools/ ,
and for gsutil at https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gsutil/ .
- Jimmy
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