[xen-tools-discuss] xen-tools 4.8 released; could need a better maintainer

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

the past weekend, I published the xen-tools release 4.8 and uploaded
the signed[0] tar-ball[1] to the xen-tools.org website as well as
GitHub[2] and the Debian package to Debian Unstable[3]. In the
meanwhile it has migrated to Debian Testing[4] as well.

[0] https://xen-tools.org/software/xen-tools/xen-tools-4.8.tar.gz.asc
[1] https://xen-tools.org/software/xen-tools/xen-tools-4.8.tar.gz
[2] https://github.com/xen-tools/xen-tools/releases
[3] https://packages.qa.debian.org/x/xen-tools/news/20190209T015029Z.html
    https://tracker.debian.org/news/1028802/
[4] https://packages.qa.debian.org/x/xen-tools/news/20190211T043928Z.html
    https://tracker.debian.org/news/1029640/

Checksums for the tar ball at [1] and [2]:

MD5:    add3c66752d211a4f5616c8e7f4212a0
SHA1:   093b27a695bc86970c5b82d977afdcbbc0815ee6
SHA256: 8adbca004292bb622256f8b9a91f12d2
	7e4c1bc9a02833379faa9eebf585fa5a
SHA512: c76e8dd6a9967eeded8ad3e0eb84189c
	c396e0fbb4d158fb8332c5c9ba5bd2d2
	df2dddea673c7349765e6f525996694c
	c63f49664da566c45e184f7863a1414e

Changes from 4.7 to 4.8
=======================

xen-tools 4.8 is primarily a maintenance release which adds support
for more recent Debian and Ubuntu releases as DomU as well as Dom0.

It though also adds a bunch of additions like ZFS and LVM Thin
Provisioning support contributed by multiple 3rd party contributors
via pull requests. (Thanks!)

New Features
------------

* Support for ZFS volumes (by Marc Bigler, GH #50)
* Support for LVM thin provisioning (by Nico Boehr, GH #47)
* Support for really random MAC addresses upon every xen-create-image
  invocation by using the new option --randommac. (by Pietro Stäheli,
  closes Debian bug report #855703)
* distributions.conf now supports arbitrary keyring files in
  /usr/share/keyrings/. (Needed for some EoL Ubuntu releases.)
* Support for netplan.io network configuration as used in recent
  Ubuntu releases. (Hook by Arno and Peter, GH #51)

Bug Fixes
---------

* Minor documentation fixes.
* Eliminate progress reporting which is useless in logs. (Yuri Sakhno,
  GH #42)
* Drop pygrub path detection from xm.tmpl, Xen prefers a path-less
  bootloader='pygrub'.

Distribution Releases Changes
-----------------------------

* Support for
  + Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark
  + Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver (LTS) (GH #51)
  + Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish
* Preliminary support for Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo
* Knows about code name for Debian 12 (Bookworm).
* Considers Ubuntu Yakkety, Zesty and Artful being EoL.
* Set Ubuntu fallback suite to the latest LTS, i.e. 18.04 Bionic.

Other Changes
-------------

* Change all occurrences of httpredir.debian.org to deb.debian.org
  except those for the debian-archive. The latter now point to
  archive.debian.org directly.
* Many improvements for the release-testing script.
* Only run xen-toolstack helper script if both, xm and xl are present.
  Avoids warning about deprecated helper script.

A bunch of proposed changes didn't make it into the release
-----------------------------------------------------------

Due to the Debian Freeze being quite close, I didn't manage to get
everything I wanted into 4.8. A few improvements suggested on the
mailing list like support for recognizing different mirror paths,
etc. might go into a 4.8.1, but I don't want to promise it.

xen-tools needs a more appropriate maintainer
---------------------------------------------

This release was long overdue and showed me, that not needing
xen-tools that often anymore(*) causes me to let the xen-tools
maintenance slide: There was no release for two years and the current
release was prompted by the Debian freeze as the previous release was.

Short said: xen-tools needs a new maintainer, best someone who uses it
on a regular basis.

So xen-tools is basically up for adoption, upstream as well as the
Debian package. I will still contribute and help, but obviously I am
not the most appropriate maintainer for it anymore. Contact me, if
you're interested.

(*) 2.5 years ago I changed to a different team at work where I no
    more maintain any hosting infrastructure. So the only place where
    I still need and use xen-tools are on one server at home and one
    for voluntary work in an association. But in both cases new DomUs
    are rather seldom, i.e. only every other year or so. I even had to
    misuse my only server hardware running Debian Testing on real
    hardware for xen-tools release testing, because I no more had a
    server where I can easily test booting and tear down of DomUs.

		Kind regards, Axel
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