[Debian-ha-maintainers] Linux-HA Jessie release goals

[Andrew Beekhof]

On 21/05/2013, at 4:50 PM, Philipp Marek <philipp.marek at linbit.com> wrote:

> Hello Andrew,
> hello Martin,
> 
>>> 2. Another issue is Heartbeat support. Andres Rodriguez has brought
>>> up the idea of drop-
>>> ping support for the Heartbeat communication stack altogether to
>>> force a migration to the
>>> new Corosync 2. While I was originally reluctant to this, by now I
>>> think there are quite some
>>> reasons speaking for it.
>>> 
>>> There has not been a single Heartbeat release for almost two years
>>> now,
>> 
>> Realistically its been even longer.
>> Apart from the crm bits, very little was changing in releases since
>> even 2.0.0
>> 
>> I'd love to see someone get really stuck into the codebase, to clean
>> it up and push it forward.
>> But I don't see that happening any time soon.
> Probably not, unless we find someone to pay us for that ;)
> 
> 
>>> according to
>>> Philipp Marek from LINBIT, Heartbeat's current upstream, a new
>>> version 3.0.6 is planned:
> ...
>>> Plus, we have no
>>> idea if upstream, at some point, will simply decide to drop the
>>> Heartbeat support altogether
>>> (Andrew, your input would be highly appreciated on this one).
>> 
>> As long as the support overhead is minimal, which it has been so far
>> and I see no reason it will change, I have no problem leaving it in.
>> Once upon a time there were some features we were considering that
>> would only work with corosync, but I they've been put on the
>> back-burner, dropped or modified.
> Lars has been pushing a few changes now, and wants (hopes) to do a
> 3.0.6rc1 still in May.
> 
> There are no big changes planned, though - heartbeat simply _works_,
> and it works so good that hardly any changes are necessary!

Oh absolutely.

Except for the CCM which is flaky beyond 2 nodes and no-one knows how it works.
And the bloated/convoluted IPC code.
And the small and fixed cluster message sizes.
And the ancient logging code (libqb's has been vast improvement!).
Or the lack of message synchronicity to name at least one feature.

Apart from at least that, completely perfect :-)

Bit-rot is a fact of life and anything that isn't moving forwards is busy moving backwards.

> 
> The code is stable - so why should we try to mess around in there?
> 
> 
> BTW, Heartbeat has a few connection plugins that Corosync is missing
> (tipc, rds, hbaping).

I'm pretty sure corosync supports at least some of those.

> 
> 
>>> Summary: I opt for
>>> a. Removing support for Heartbeat from Pacemaker
>>> b. Switching to Pacemaker 1.1.9 or later + Corosync 2
>>> c. Providing DebConf notices about people breaking their setups
>>> d. Continue to support crmsh alongside with PCS
>>> 
>>> Any comments are highly appreciated.
> -1 for a)
> +1 for the rest, of course.
> 
> 
> We're building the Pacemaker packages with support for both CCMs,
> so that people can switch as necessary "on the fly".
> *Please* do the same for Debian.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Phil
> 
> -- 
> : Ing. Philipp Marek
> : LINBIT | Your Way to High Availability
> : DRBD/HA support and consulting                 http://www.linbit.com :
> 
> DRBD® and LINBIT® are registered trademarks of LINBIT, Austria.
>