[Debian-ha-maintainers] Split of HA agents into multiple binary packages

[Ferenc Wágner]

Hi Lucas and Valentin,

I'm sorry for being this late to the party.  You gathered substantial
content in this thread, let me try to condense it to gain better
overview.

First, some points seem to require further clarification:

- If I understand Lucas correctly, some fence agents don't work after
  installation due to missing dependencies.  Could you please provide
  the concrete examples?  This would be good and easy to fix.
  On the other hand the resource agent packages obviously can't depend
  on all the managed components in the current setup.

- Is the reverse also a significant problem?  How much content does the
  current monolithic fence-agents package install?  It's quite small in
  itself, but there can be big dependencies.  Here I wouldn't consider
  Python, though, since it's widely installed anyway.


There are some clear advantages of splitting fence-agents:

- consistency with Fedora/Red Hat

- installing only the explicitly requested fence agents


There are some not-so-clear points:

- simpler setup (How exactly?  Cluster setup is often done with Ansible
  or some similar tool anyway.)

- space savings (Possibly insignificant, see second question above.)

- better user experience (We don't know of any user requests or reports.)


While there are also reasons against the split:

- even Fedora/Red Hat does not split resource-agents

- consistency between fence- and resource-agents packages

- consistency with current Debian practice

- hundreds of binary packages would be significantly harder to maintain
  than two

- requires FTP master involvement on agent set changes (after a quick
  look that's 1 in 2022, but at least 3 in 2021)

- impossible to co-install two web-server resource agents if they pulled
  their servers with default configs, since they couldn't both start, so
  the resource-agent meta-package wouldn't work

- strict dependencies would unnecessarily pull in server packages when
  managing self-compiled servers

Please add more points if needed, I probably haven't grasped everything
and may have misinterpreted some arguments.  Based on the above I'd be
wary to change the design, but further input to the above questions may
tip the balance.
-- 
Regards,
Feri.