RE: [Xen-devel] xend doesn't start with xen-staging tip (on ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04)

[Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Dan Magenheimer writes ("RE: [Xen-devel] xend doesn't start with xen-
> staging tip (on ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04)"):
> > IMHO, at an absolute minimum, breaking something that so many people
> > have been dependent on for so long should at least result in
> > some huge red flag being raised.  I understand there's no easy
> > way to do this, but at least some 10-20 line message in xend.log
> > in ALL CAPS SAYING DEFAULTS HAVE BEEN CHANGED AND YOU NEED TO
> > DO THIS NOW TO GET PREVIOUS BEHAVIOR
> 
> I'm not sure we need to go quite this far but if you want an improved
> error message that gets written to xend.log (or to stderr) when
> xencommons is not run then I think the answer is for someone to ahead
> and submit a patch.

That would be good.  For some, I suspect that would be an easy
patch.  (Not for me.)
 
> > Sadly, my python ability is insufficient for this which is
> > why I am otherwise cheering on the development of xl. ;-)
> 
> We are talking about xen-unstable here; users are expected to cope
> with a certain amount of skew, trouble and instability.

Certainly, but that doesn't mean it is OK to inflict pain needlessly
on the vast majority of developers to increase convenience for a few.
I can easily see myself spending hours trying to figure out what
I broke or what version mismatch I accidentally caused etc etc,
and the only indication that this (IMHO) very major init change
happened was a brief comment from Keir that "maybe we should fix
this" in a seemingly irrelevant xen-devel thread.

Sorry to beat on this, but if we expect the Xen developer
community to thrive and grow (which I assume is important to
all of us), this is an example of how we are shooting ourselves
in the foot.

> In 4.1 we expect that xend will no longer be the default
> configuration; we expect xl to be sufficiently stable and featureful
> to be used as a dropin replacement for xm, for almost all current
> xm/xend users.
> 
> Obviously we will make a good deal of noise about this in the
> changelog, release notes, etc.

Drop in would be great.  Noise and documentation is also great.
Requiring every installer to setup and manipulate a new set of
obscure init commands and/or brctls and/or other things that
used to work fine in every distro for 3.4/4.0... not so great.
But if it gets rid of all those horrible python stack traces,
I guess it's all worth it.  ;-)

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