[Fedora-xen] xen-unstable => 3.2, binary packages

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Dec 10, 2007 at 01:02:18PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Daniel Veillard writes ("Re: [Fedora-xen] xen-unstable => 3.2, binary packages"):
> >   'Fedora Core' was renamed 'Fedora' between version 6 and 7, you
> > will find the latests under the 'releases' subdir:
> 
> Ahh!  Thanks.
> 
> >  My own opinion about this is that since xen is packaged as part of
> > Fedora, rebuilding a package on your side might be more of a problem
> > than a solution (I mean for official release rather than for testing)
> > since it's best to keep a coherency. If you have some problems with
> > the packages as done in Fedora, it's better to get the issues (assuming
> > any) solved, rather than putting a parallel set of packages, in the end
> > avoiding users confusions helps everybody in my opinion.
> 
> Right, I can absolutely see where you're coming from and obviously I
> would prefer to let Fedora developers do the work too :-).
> 
> The question is what users might be expected to do between the release
> of Xen 3.2 and the time that Fedora releases its Xen 3.2 packages.
> For most users of Xen it's a pretty critical and important package and
> some kind of backport of Xen 3.2 onto their running system is likely
> to be valuable to many.  Xen users may often want to choose explicitly
> to upgrade their Xen version.
> 
> I don't know what Fedora's policy is about including new upstream
> versions in updates, but I would think that most sensible policies
> would generally frown on pushing a new hypervisor into an
> already-released distribution.

Since the userspace and hypervisor have a pretty tight ABI requirement we
cannot do major Xen upgrades during the life of any single Fedora release.
So, during the rawhide development cycles we track to the latest Xen major
release, and then Fedora releases we track the minor bug fix release of
Xen. So,  Fedora 7 and 8 were released on Xen 3.1.0 and are now updated to
Xen 3.1.2.   We will not update Fedora 7 or 8 to Xen 3.2.0 because the
3.2.0 hypervisor is ABI incompatible with the 3.1.x userspace and vica-verca

Dan.
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