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What is OpenStack?
OpenStack is by far the largest free software IaaS (infrastructure as a service) cloud project. It receives collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous Free Software cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.
Who maintains OpenStack in Debian? How to contribute?
The OpenStack Debian GNU/Linux packages are maintained by a team managed on salsa.debian.org available daily, either through the OpenStack packaging mailing list or via IRC on #debian-openstack on the OFTC network.
Also, the team now maintains a /OpenStack/todo on the packaging work.
How to install OpenStack on Debian
Using Debian unstable/testing
We very much encourage everyone to use Debian testing/unstable to run OpenStack. Bug reports welcome!
Using a pure Debian Stable or adding Debian backports repositories
Debian users are given the choice to just use whatever version of OpenStack is in Debian, during the lifetime of Stable. OpenStack packages are currently not supported when your stable Debian becomes LTS (volunteers to do the work are welcome). So if you choose Stable, you roughly need to either upgrade through each backport repositories or make a new deployment (see below).
If you decide to use the debian.net backport repositories, then currently, the OpenStack team only guarantee security support for them for the first 6 months of the release, until we push a new release to Unstable.
Upgrading OpenStack in Debian
Upgrades to fix CVEs which I publish in Debian stable have always been painless (I cross fingers that it continues this way).
As it's not possible to skip an upstream release when upgrading, if you wish to upgrade a deployment from one Debian stable release to another, then you must use the team's unofficial backport repositories.
These repositories *always* built using the exact same Git tree than in Debian unstable, and are backports of each OpenStack releases to the latest Debian Stable. Here's a few of the last of these repositories:
http://stretch-queens.debian.net/debian stretch-queens-backports main http://stretch-queens.debian.net/debian stretch-queens-backports-nochanges main
http://stretch-rocky.debian.net/debian stretch-rocky-backports main http://stretch-rocky.debian.net/debian stretch-rocky-backports-nochanges main
http://buster-stein.debian.net/debian stretch-stein-backports main http://buster-stein.debian.net/debian stretch-stein-backports-nochanges main
If you think upgrading 5 OpenStack release in your cluster is too much work for just upgrading a Debian OpenStack cloud running stable, then what's suggested is to *not* do upgrade, and instead, install a new deployment and migrate your workload to a new deployment on the next Debian release.
Documentation
You may find documentation on how to use and install OpenStack over here:
The official OpenStack documentation now including Debian specifics on a separated manual.
The current doc for Debian with Debconf is available at: install guide debconf. Please feel free to contribute, by cloning https://github.com/openstack/openstack-manuals and using git-review.
How Debian users should report bugs?
Bugs shall be reported against the Debian packages the same way as the for other packages in Debian. If you don't know how to do it, you can read this page on the official Debian site.