Add support for Ubuntu

[cevich]

Sure we could use travis, but the releases lag quite a bit and jobs are limited to working within a container. What would it take to support, say, the latest release + latest LTS?

[jlebon]

It's feasible, though I'm unsure about the benefit to cost ratio. I don't know much about Ubuntu, and I'd wager there'd be a lot of work involved in generalizing the tight coupling we have against Fedora/CentOS. Patches welcome of course! Though you'd have to also make sure the Ubuntu image stream(s) is kept up to date. Is any containerization no go, or could it work e.g. in a privileged container, or something adequately set up by bubblewrap? Worse case, you can always use nested virtualization!

[cevich]

The use-case here is replacing Travis (cri-o PR linked above), so only bare-metal (VMs) are needed. The support for Ubuntu could be re-used for all other OCI-based container projects. Where Travis is generall a PITA, or failing to keep up to date or forcing the use of containers.

The cost to adding it would mainly only be up-front, no? Keeping the images updated could/would be automated, ya?

[cevich]

@jlebon, justification from Dan:

@cevich currently we are struggling with travis for support of latest Ubuntu. This is causing people like @nalind to jump through hoops to keep it working. Therefore we would like to get rid of travis, and keeping two CI/CD systems running would be complicated.

Support for Ubuntu in travis, will keep us honest and make sure that cri-o will always compile on it. Otherwise we will be only testing on Fedora based operating systems.

[cevich]

@jberkus I glanced through the code here but don't see anywhere the selected distro. (from .papr.yml) is filtered other than the image (in the openstack cloud) existing or not. I'm not an Ubuntu-guy, but I have to believe they have cloud-images available. Am I missing something, or is adding Ubuntu support really just a matter of making sure the images are available?

[miabbott]

Keeping the images updated could/would be automated, ya?

Am I missing something, or is adding Ubuntu support really just a matter of making sure the images are available?

Right now the OpenStack tenant where the PAPR does all it's magic is lacking an Ubuntu cloud image. Probably could get added, but someone would have to own the upload/maintenance of it. Given all the other work that we are currently facing, it seems like Ubuntu support is low on the list of priorities. (My opinion, obviously)

That being said, if someone wants to step up with the necessary patches and tooling for keeping Ubuntu up-to-date in the OpenStack tenant, I'm sure that would go a long way. 😉