RE: [Xen-devel] xend doesn't start with xen-staging tip (on ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04)

[Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Stefano Stabellini [mailto:stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Friday, June 18, 2010 3:53 AM
> To: Dan Magenheimer
> Cc: Dulloor; Patrick Colp; xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [Xen-devel] xend doesn't start with xen-staging tip (on
> ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04)
> 
> On Fri, 18 Jun 2010, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
> > IMHO, xend shouldn't change.  If we are eventually moving
> > to xl anyway, breaking xend seems like unnecessary pain.
> >
> 
> Agreed, but what happens in the user has both installed?
> Trying to start xenstored twice seemed a bad choice, using a global
> variable to decide which toolstack you want (my first attempt) was
> pretty
> ugly, so we decided to move the common initializations in a separate
> file.

There are hundreds (if not thousands) of development systems
that automatically launch xend today and a great deal of documentation
and experience behind it.  For most developers, the experience is
"it just works and so I can concentrate on what I want to develop".

Breaking this for a very small fraction of users with both
installed doesn't seem like a good tradeoff to me.

When xl is solid enough to become the default for everyone,
breaking xend becomes unavoidable, but until then it is
unnecessary pain.

IMHO, at an absolute minimum, breaking something that so many people
have been dependent on for so long should at least result in
some huge red flag being raised.  I understand there's no easy
way to do this, but at least some 10-20 line message in xend.log
in ALL CAPS SAYING DEFAULTS HAVE BEEN CHANGED AND YOU NEED TO
DO THIS NOW TO GET PREVIOUS BEHAVIOR would be nice when xend
is auto-launched at init by those hundreds of machines and/or
manually launched when the user scratches their head trying to
diagnose why their VM launch failed.

Sadly, my python ability is insufficient for this which is
why I am otherwise cheering on the development of xl. ;-)

My two cents...

Dan

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