[Pkg-xen-devel] Xen advice requested

[Thomas Goirand]

Paul van der Vlis wrote:
> Thomas Goirand schreef:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I DON'T want to hurt anybody here, so please, pkg-xen-devel team, do not
>> take what I'm writing here badly, you guys are doing a very hard work,
>> and I don't think I'd be able to manage it as good as you did.
>>
>> However, I really think that the Xen kernels from Debian are not so
>> usable in production
> 
> Can you tell us more about the problems you have seen?
> 
> With regards,
> Paul van der Vlis.

First problem: Etch packaged version 3.0.3. To me it's a pretty bad
choice, this version (in my experience) is not stable and causes problems.

Second thing (maybe the most important): the bindings of python for the
Xen API are not properly setup, it's set with a version number. If I'm
remembering well, its all about /usr/lib/python/xen that is under the
packaged version of Xen called something like
/usr/lib/python/xen-VERSION, with no symlink provided for that folder.

Then anything that wants to includes it FAILS to do so, and there is no
predictable way of knowing how to fix when you are a package using the
bindings. I give you a simple example in python, that intend to find the
name of the virtual interface the VPS is using, and that we are using in
our code:

sys.path.append( '/usr/lib/python' )
import xen.xm.main as xenxm
id = int(xenxm.sxp.child_value(info, 'id', '-1'))
networkDeviceName="vif%s" % id

As /usr/lib/python/xen doesn't exist, but instead there is a
/usr/lib/python/xen-VERSION, the import fails if using the Debian package...

Thomas