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Packaging Cassandra for Ubuntu

[Clint Byrum]

Greetings,

I've discussed this on the IRC channel briefly before (handle: SpamapS) and am 
interested in hearing what the Cassandra developer community as a whole has to 
say about our efforts to package Cassandra for Ubuntu.

Some of you may know that it is against policy in both Debian and Ubuntu  to 
package something with embedded library binaries [1]. Cassandra's current 
debian packages ship the lib/*.jar files, and so cannot be included in the 
official archives.

Some have expressed concern that we might end up using different versions of 
the libraries than are shipped with a given release of Cassandra. Thats 
entirely possible, as we may have other java applications that use these 
libraries already.

So I am appealing to you, the Cassandra development community, to weigh in with 
your recommendations on making Cassandra and its dependencies available in 
Ubuntu.

Specifically I'd like to address:

* What is the perceived and real impact of Library versions diverging from 
Cassandra's shipped libraries over time.
* We will most likely conflict with the Cassandra published debian packages. Is 
this acceptable? Suggested solutions?

Thank you!

Clint Byrum
Ubuntu Server Team

--
1. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#s-embeddedfiles

Re: Packaging Cassandra for Ubuntu

[Philip Stanhope]

I have only used the modified sources.list approach to make apt-get work. In my 
case the only java running on the resulting ubuntu 9.1 karmic koala instance 
was to support Cassandra.

What would the preferred best practice be? For example, would it be to have the 
*.jar files be placed in a private Cassandra specific directory and classpath 
pointing to that?

A related concern that I have with this approach is that it pulls the openjdk 
version. Yet, recommended best practice from folks who've been running 
Cassandra for awhile is to use the Sun jvm. I understand the reason to prefer 
the non-Sun/Oracle option from a packaging perspective ... but when advice is 
given to "of course use the Sun JDK..." I do wonder.

From my perspective, I don't care where things end up. I simply want to be able 
to something like the following:

apt-get update

And then one of the following:

apt-get install cassandra_0_6_2_open_jdk_XX
apt-get install cassandra_0_6_3_open_jdk_XX
apt-get install cassandra_0_6_3_sun_jdk_XX
apt-get install cassandra_latest_sun_jdk_XX
etc...

I'd like similar options for yum for CentOS.

Given the relatively fast moving changes with Cassandra, being able to install 
a specific version is very important to me. 

-phil


On Jun 3, 2010, at 10:55 AM, Clint Byrum wrote:

> Greetings,
> 
> I've discussed this on the IRC channel briefly before (handle: SpamapS) and 
> am interested in hearing what the Cassandra developer community as a whole 
> has to say about our efforts to package Cassandra for Ubuntu.
> 
> Some of you may know that it is against policy in both Debian and Ubuntu  to 
> package something with embedded library binaries [1]. Cassandra's current 
> debian packages ship the lib/*.jar files, and so cannot be included in the 
> official archives.
> 
> Some have expressed concern that we might end up using different versions of 
> the libraries than are shipped with a given release of Cassandra. Thats 
> entirely possible, as we may have other java applications that use these 
> libraries already.
> 
> So I am appealing to you, the Cassandra development community, to weigh in 
> with your recommendations on making Cassandra and its dependencies available 
> in Ubuntu.
> 
> Specifically I'd like to address:
> 
> * What is the perceived and real impact of Library versions diverging from 
> Cassandra's shipped libraries over time.
> * We will most likely conflict with the Cassandra published debian packages. 
> Is this acceptable? Suggested solutions?
> 
> Thank you!
> 
> Clint Byrum
> Ubuntu Server Team
> 
> --
> 1. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#s-embeddedfiles

Re: Packaging Cassandra for Ubuntu

[Eric Evans]

On Thu, 2010-06-03 at 07:55 -0700, Clint Byrum wrote:
> I've discussed this on the IRC channel briefly before (handle:
> SpamapS) and am interested in hearing what the Cassandra developer
> community as a whole has to say about our efforts to package Cassandra
> for Ubuntu.

I'm ambivalent. ;) Seriously though, I am interested in getting it into
Debian, and obviously there is quite a bit of synergy here.

> Some of you may know that it is against policy in both Debian and
> Ubuntu  to package something with embedded library binaries [1].
> Cassandra's current debian packages ship the lib/*.jar files, and so
> cannot be included in the official archives.

Right, so the Cassandra source will need to be repacked and stripped of
the embedded jars, and these third-party dependencies packaged
separately.

> Some have expressed concern that we might end up using different
> versions of the libraries than are shipped with a given release of
> Cassandra. Thats entirely possible, as we may have other java
> applications that use these libraries already.

I don't know of any such issues off hand, and I'm pretty confident we
can work our way through them if any arise.

> So I am appealing to you, the Cassandra development community, to
> weigh in with your recommendations on making Cassandra and its
> dependencies available in Ubuntu.
> 
> Specifically I'd like to address:
> 
> * What is the perceived and real impact of Library versions diverging
> from Cassandra's shipped libraries over time.

I don't think that this is more or less likely to happen here than in
other projects. If anything, this will provide some much needed exposure
of our (Cassandra's) dependencies.

> * We will most likely conflict with the Cassandra published debian packages. 
> Is this acceptable? Suggested solutions? 

Ultimately, I think packages in Ubuntu/Debian can replace the builds
currently hosted on ASF mirrors.

-- 
Eric Evans
eev...@rackspace.com

Re: Packaging Cassandra for Ubuntu

[paul cannon]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 2:11 PM, Eric Evans  wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-06-03 at 07:55 -0700, Clint Byrum wrote:
>> * We will most likely conflict with the Cassandra published debian packages. 
>> Is this acceptable? Suggested solutions?
>
> Ultimately, I think packages in Ubuntu/Debian can replace the builds
> currently hosted on ASF mirrors.

Probably not in cases where people want to use new releases; there is
a non-negligible time delay in getting packages into released or
"testing" suites of Ubuntu and Debian, and sometimes even into Debian
unstable.

With cassandra being a relatively fast-moving target, it is probably
still worthwhile to provide packages straight from an ASF repository.

Those same packages could be the ones submitted for inclusion in
Debian/Ubuntu, though.

--
paul, the

Re: Packaging Cassandra for Ubuntu

[Eric Evans]

On Thu, 2010-06-03 at 14:53 -0600, paul cannon wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 2:11 PM, Eric Evans 
> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2010-06-03 at 07:55 -0700, Clint Byrum wrote:
> >> * We will most likely conflict with the Cassandra published debian
> packages. Is this acceptable? Suggested solutions?
> >
> > Ultimately, I think packages in Ubuntu/Debian can replace the builds
> > currently hosted on ASF mirrors.
> 
> Probably not in cases where people want to use new releases; there is
> a non-negligible time delay in getting packages into released or
> "testing" suites of Ubuntu and Debian, and sometimes even into Debian
> unstable.

The packages uploaded to the ASF mirrors have thus far been stable
releases. Those could just as easily be uploaded to backports.org.

-- 
Eric Evans
eev...@rackspace.com

Re: Packaging Cassandra for Ubuntu

[paul cannon]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Eric Evans  wrote:
> The packages uploaded to the ASF mirrors have thus far been stable
> releases. Those could just as easily be uploaded to backports.org.

backports.org only allows versions of packages which are already in
Debian testing.

-- 
paul, the

Re: Packaging Cassandra for Ubuntu

[Clint Byrum]

On Jun 3, 2010, at 1:53 PM, paul cannon wrote:
> 
> Probably not in cases where people want to use new releases; there is
> a non-negligible time delay in getting packages into released or
> "testing" suites of Ubuntu and Debian, and sometimes even into Debian
> unstable.
> 
> With cassandra being a relatively fast-moving target, it is probably
> still worthwhile to provide packages straight from an ASF repository.
> 
> Those same packages could be the ones submitted for inclusion in
> Debian/Ubuntu, though.
> 

Ubuntu does have a 6 month release cycle, so while I'm sure cassandra revs 
quite a bit every 6 months, users who are maybe a little more conservative will 
be perfectly fine with waiting 6 months to 1 year to upgrade. And for those 
users that want something better, There's always a PPA [1]. They're becoming 
popular with upstreams that want to make sure the latest version is available 
to their users. As one example, Chromium maintains one [2]. In fact, we have a 
ppa for nightly builds of many software projects to make it easier for our 
users to report bugs back to upstreams.

And as Eric states, backports.org would work as well as long as our debian 
maintainer keeps things up to date.

--
1. https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ppas
2. https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa