[569] in athena10
Athena 10 third party software: Proposals and discussion.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Fri Oct 10 16:37:50 2008
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To: athena10@MIT.EDU, owls@MIT.EDU
From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:36:24 -0400
On Friday 3 October, Bill Cattey, Jonathan Reed, and Alex Prengel met
and discussed issues surrounding support of third party software
under Athena 10.
The over-arching principle here is a review and re-think of Athena
lockers as the source of third party software. For licensed, third
party software, it still makes sense to create a locker to provide
usage tracking, centralized configuration and administration. But
for a lot of software, it seems to make much more sense to use the
packaging, updating, and upstream support available various Ubuntu
repositories.
For things like matlab, the Athena locker would behave just the same.
For FOSS and other variations on "free" software previously
maintained in Athena lockers
the Ubuntu package would be installed locally. Cluster machines
would install a substantial number of the presently available locker
packages. Private machine owners would install only the particular
packages they needed. Once installed, Ubuntu or the upstream
provider would supply the updates, not us.
Jonathan Reed has a draft of a position paper on Athena 10 third
party software at:
https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/x/2gM0AQ
Not all of the discussion and proposed decisions have been
incorporated into that document, but we expect it will evolve into
the definitive statement of policy and procedure regarding Athena 10
third party software.
Below are the proposed decisions that made sense to Cattey, Reed and
Prengel. There remain a couple open questions:
Open Questions:
As we transition to encouraging users to locally install software,
should the "add" command print a message providing install
instructions, or perform the software installation?
For "attach and run" software, does it make sense to convert to an
"attach, install and run" implementation?
Specific questions for the Athena Release Team and Owls appear after
the proposed decisions below.
Proposed Decisions:
1. Alex Prengel produced a long list of libraries and applications
currently supported in lockers that he would like incorporated into
the Athena 10 release. We propose to put all of this into the Athena
10 cluster release either by adding the packages to the debathena-
cluster-software metapackage, or by crafting a new debathena-cluster-
thirdparty metapackage. The new metapackage would have the advantage
that Alex could be the designated owner, and could "add things to the
release" himself rather than appealing to the Athena Release Team as
he has in the past.
2. We will define an explicit update process for updating the list
third party software managed though the metapackage proposed in #1
above. Revising the list of packages in the metapackage twice a year
is acceptable to Alex. From our experience with early failures of
the debathena-cluster software package we know that testing that this
package successfully installs after each update is important.
3. We propose a policy of preferring to offer and support packages
supplied by Ubuntu repositories preferentially to MIT-crafted
lockers. MIT validation and support through a locker would only be
for a few special cases where there was compelling reason for an MIT-
customized version. (For example the software is licensed to MIT,
and needs to be centrally administered.) Classes requiring a version
different from both standard Ubuntu offerings, and an MIT-wide
customization would have to put the software into a course-specific
locker.
4. To mange the transition of users expecting software in lockers to
users expecting to install the Ubuntu version of software, we will
craft a template for the locker software scripting that will either:
a. Print a reminder how to install the Ubuntu version.
b. Perform the software install.
5. We propose that indeed it is acceptable for an "attach and run"
script to take a little longer to execute because it becomes an
"attach, install and run" script. This would be the case for
software historically managed in lockers for Athena when used in a
non-cluster environment.
6. We propose to limit support of third party software to Athena 10.
Although we'd work never to intentionally break things for the
broader set of platforms and versions of debathena outside the Athena
10 platform and versions, testing of and answering questions about
third party software running outside of Athena 10 would be on a best
efforts basis.
7. The Athena 10 root password and login behaviors would be the same
as presently set up for Athena 9.
8. Expecting users to still follow the third party software
convention of
add <program>
<program>
for the forseeable future, we propose that lockers supporting the
"install the Ubuntu standard package" convention be set up with a
present but empty "i386_deb40" arch subdirectory. This way the add
command will not inappropriately put Athena 9 software into the
user's search path when locally installed software is expected to be
used, by users running locker software in this way.
----
In addition to the above decisions proposed, we have the following
questions:
For Athena Release Team:
When is the next Ubuntu update going to be incorporated into Athena?
Will it be the next LTS Ubuntu Release, or the next semi-annual one?
For Owls:
What is the expected timeframe for de-supporting Athena 9?
What is the plan for explicitly notifying customers of the de-
support of Desktop Solaris?
For IS&T going forward:
To what extent will IS&T be an escalation path for bugs in Ubuntu
and the third party
software?
To what extent will policy to customers become, "We just install
it. We don't fix it."?
----
Action items from the meeting.
wdc types in the notes and sends them out. (DONE)
alexp inventories the list of and size of the set of desired debian
packages (DONE)
Respectfully submitted,
-Bill Cattey
----
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----
William Cattey
Linux Platform Coordinator
MIT Information Services & Technology
N42-040M, 617-253-0140, wdc@mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/wdc/www/
