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id="docs-internal-guid-cdf072b7-7fff-4ba0-0e07-e3ec721c5abb"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">Hi everyone,</span></p>
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style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:12pt;margin-bottom:12pt;"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">I am Lucas and I am a Debian and Ubuntu developer. I have been taking care of the HA stack in Ubuntu for a while. Since I started to work on it I have noticed some issues with HA agents (a.k.a fence-agents and resource-agents), like missing dependencies and also installing some packages which might not be needed by the agent I want to use. I believe the way we ship those agents right now is not ideal for our users, and since we are approaching a new development cycle for Debian I decided to propose some changes here and see your thoughts.</span></p>
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style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:12pt;margin-bottom:12pt;"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">Once I identified this issue, the first thing I did was checking what Fedora/Red Hat was doing since they are also the upstream of those projects. There they have one binary package per agent and also some binary packages shipping related agents useful in specific scenarios. This seems to be the ideal scenario thinking about user experience, so one can install targeted packages with all the needed dependencies instead of pulling all the agents in a single package with non-optimal dependency management (what we have in Debian right now IMHO).</span></p>
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style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:12pt;margin-bottom:12pt;"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">In Ubuntu, we started an initiative to curate some agents, which means that we have automated tests in place for them [1]. Those curated agents are now shipped in a binary package called {fence,resource}-agents-base, and all the non-curated agents are shipped in a binary package called {fence,resource}-agents-extra. This is just an intermediary step and we already know those changes have their own issues. We are still shipping multiple agents in a single binary package, this time we have all the needed dependencies in place, but the user experience is not that good because if a user wants a single agent in the curated set they will get some dependencies installed which are not needed for their use case.</span></p>
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style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:12pt;margin-bottom:12pt;"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">My proposal is to move to what the upstream of those projects are doing, and create a separate binary package for each agent, and the agent would be useful out-of-the-box (with everything needed installed). Since those projects are quite stable, without big changes, I believe it is OK to maintain them all as separate binary packages. I understand it will introduce many new binary packages in the archive but I really believe this will help our users' experience using the HA stack in Debian.</span></p>
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style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:12pt;margin-bottom:12pt;"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">As a starting point I already have a salsa MR up for review for fence-agents [2]. If the maintainers agree on the approach I will do those changes in resource-agents as well. My idea would be to get those changes in experimental until the end of the freeze for the next release.</span></p>
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style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:12pt;margin-bottom:12pt;"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">Let me know your thoughts.</span></p>
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style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:12pt;margin-bottom:12pt;"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">TIA!</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">
</span></p>
<span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">[1] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://github.com/canonical/server-test-scripts/tree/main/ha/virsh" moz-do-not-send="true">https://github.com/canonical/server-test-scripts/tree/main/ha/virsh</a></span><br>
<span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">[2] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://salsa.debian.org/ha-team/fence-agents/-/merge_requests/4" moz-do-not-send="true">https://salsa.debian.org/ha-team/fence-agents/-/merge_requests/4</a></span>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Lucas Kanashiro</pre>
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