[fedfs-utils] FedFS support in Fedora 17?

[Chuck Lever]

Hi Jeff-

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 2:02 PM, Jeff Layton <jlayton at poochiereds.net> wrote:
> I'd like to tentatively plan to add FedFS support to Fedora 17. The
> feature freeze date for Fedora 16 is July 26, 2011. We can probably
> ball-park the feature freeze for F17 at around 6 months from then
> (January 26th, 2012).

At this stage of development, a two or three week freeze warning is
not sufficient.  Later, when fedfs-utils is more mature, that
shouldn't be a difficulty.

> For this to work, we'd need most everything to be merged upstream by
> that time. This includes the nfs-utils and kernel changes required for
> server-side support. Does this seem like a reasonable target?

The server pieces (which require the nfs-utils and kernel changes) are
going to change radically in the next several months.  I don't expect
that work to be done until late Fall.  Afterwards, there are several
important security pieces that are planned for 1Q12 or later that are
probably going to be requirements for distributors.

If you want to package only the client side pieces, a stable version
of those pieces is coming soon when I release fedfs-utils-0.7.0, after
I return from traveling August 1.

> To this end, I've made a first stab at a fedfs-utils rpm for rawhide:
>
>    http://fedorapeople.org/~jlayton/fedfs-utils/
>
> It's just a single monolithic package for now, but I think we'll
> probably want to split it into several packages -- maybe fedfs-client
> and fedfs-server (and maybe 2 packages for the server-side pieces --
> one for the daemons and one for management tools).
>
> Thoughts?

For me, the "readiness to integrate" criterion for fedfs-utils is
whether the user and administrative interfaces are stable (ie
unchanging).  That will be true for the file system client pieces
soon, but the server pieces are a ways out, as I mention above.  If
you want to integrate a "fedfs-client" package after fedfs-utils-0.7.0
is released, we should probably create a plan with dates to spell out
exactly what pieces will be available, and to see that your testing
and integration requirements are properly met.

There is a third piece that might be packaged separately: fedfs-admin.
 This would consist of components related to the FedFS administrative
clients (not needed on either the FedFS-enabled file system clients,
or FedFS-enabled file servers, but required for managing the contents
of a domain's NSDB).

I'm planning to attend LPC 2011 in Santa Rosa in early September
expressly to discuss FedFS.  It would be nice to have a larger
face-to-face discussion about these issues at that time (although I
recognize that is not necessarily good for meeting deadlines related
to Fedora 17).

-- 
"Blast this Christmas music!  It's joyful _and_ triumphant!"
 -- The Grinch