[DRBD-user] URGENT Request for DRBD Developers

Johnny Hughes mailing-lists at hughesjr.com
Fri May 23 19:51:53 CEST 2008

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


Art Age Software wrote:
> I am in a bit of a quandary. We are running production systems on
> RHEL-5 with the DRBD 8.0.11 build from the CentOS Extras repository.
> We urgently need to update to 8.0.12 due to the critical bug in dopd
> in 8.0.11 that essentially breaks the high availability failover
> feature of a heartbeat/drbd combination.
> 
> However, the CentOS maintainer of the DRBD package has stopped
> supporting the 8.0.x branch and has moved to supporting only the 8.2.x
> branch. We cannot upgrade to 8.2.x. The spirit of RHEL/CentOS releases is
> **stability first.** Bug fixes and security fixes are backported and
> bleeding edge new features are shunned. This is why we choose to run
> RHEL/CentOS on our production servers. If we wanted bleeding edge, we
> would run Fedora + DRBD 8.2.x.
> 
> This is not to knock the 8.2.x branch. I'm glad that you continue to
> push new features and functionality into DRBD. But you clearly
> understand the need for a more mature stable branch for your
> production users, or you would not maintain multiple branches of your
> product.
> 
> According the the CentOS maintainer, switching to 8.2.x was "the
> recommendation from the drbd developers, and we are taking their
> advice." He refers to this thread:
> 
> http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?group=gmane.linux.network.drbd&article=14090
> 
> IMHO, the CentOSPlus repository would be an appropriate place for the
> DRBD 8.2.x branch. CentOSExtras should continue to support the 8.0.x
> branch as the current "stable" branch. It should never have been
> suggested that 8.0.x be replaced by 8.2.x.
> 
> The removal of support of the 8.0.x branch in CentOS Extras is a major
> break in the the RHEL/CentOS release policy and it completely breaks
> anyone in our situation. The package management "rug" has been pulled
> out from under us. This is critically important, especially with a
> product like DRBD that has many intricate components and requires
> mating to the current kernel version. This is **not** something that
> we want to build ourselves.
> 
> I respectfully ask that you add your comments to this bug report, and
> let the CentOS DRBD maintainer know that continuing support for the
> current stable branch of DRBD is critical for your current production
> users of that branch. The bug URL is:
> 
> http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=2795

Being that I do not understand why you can use 8.0.12 but you can't use 
8.2.5 .. and being that I am also the lead centos developer for DRBD, 
maybe you can explain to me why 8.0.12 is perfect but 8.2.x is not.

If you really want 8.0.12, and if you want to pay me to maintain it, I 
would be glad to maintain both branches.  But since currently they are 
the same protocol and that you can upgrade with yum upgrade to get the 
newer version without having to do anything more than you do to install 
8.2 I am not sure what the problem is.  (There is no more steps required 
to move to drbd82 that to upgrade drbd to 8.0.12)

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes

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