Packaging/Debian

1. Debian packaging team
There is now a Debian packaging team working on OpenStack. This team consist of the following Debian Developers:

Thomas Goirand < zigo@debian.org >

Ghe Rivero < ghe@debian.org >

Julien Danjou < acid@debian.org >

Loic Dachary < loic@debian.org >

The team can be contacted through the Alioth mailing list, which also receive bug reports for all packages of the OpenStack project: openstack-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org

The QA page for the project is there: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=openstack-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org

2. Packaging work
Packages in Experimental are in fact the weekly snapshots, while SID contains tagged releases. It's to be noted that previously, the effort was made to use the same source package base as for Ubuntu, but since Ghe, Julien and Loic are working on the Debian packaging, the support for Ubuntu has been removed from the packages in Debian (as it was too much efforts and difficult to maintain).

The packages currently support KVM, and since XCP is now in Debian as well, it is also possible to run OpenStack together with XenAPI (apt-get install xcp-xapi), with no external packages (eg: you don't need to use the proprietary XenServer from Citrix, or the XCP CentOS based appliance, everything is available strait from Debian).

Since Debian wheezy is planned to be frozen in June 2012, Debian will aim at having Essex ready for it, and this is what is currently available in Debian unstable (code name: SID).

3. Git Debian packaging
If you want to participate to the Debian packaging effort, then you need to register an account on https://alioth.debian.org/ and get in touch with the team (so you can be added and have write access in the project). It's to be noted that, unlike in Ubuntu, Debian isn't using bzr for the packaging work. We use Git and git-buildpackage, because we feel it's easier to be able to just pull from upstream or cherry-pick some commits (and also, team members prefer Git over BZR). Here's a list of projects:

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=openstack/glance.git;a=summary

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=openstack/horizon.git;a=summary

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=openstack/keystone.git;a=summary

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=openstack/melange.git;a=summary

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=openstack/nova.git;a=summary

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=openstack/quantum.git;a=summary

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=openstack/swift.git;a=summary

There might be more, so just have a look at http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/ for a full list.