SaltStack and openSUSE

If you haven't been living under a rock, you've certainly noticed that SaltStack is one of the hot topics within openSUSE and SUSE. It is used in many of the major openSUSE projects like DeepSea for managing and automating Ceph deployments, in Kubic to provision Kubernetes cluster or the newly announced Spacewalk fork Uyuni project to manage your whole IT infrastructure. Therefore I think it's time to take a closer look at how SaltStack itself is being packaged and shipped and how you might collaborate.

Packages

Let's talk about the RPM packages itself for a moment. Usually when you install SaltStack (zypper in salt), you don't have to care from which repository the packages are coming. They are either in the Leap or Tumbleweed repos. But before they end up there, they are first in saltstack:testing/salt (which is for testing the new changes) and then in saltstack/salt. After the patches where accepted to saltstack/salt, the state is pushed to openSUSE:Factory/salt. This is only true for now, because we've got the rare condition that Leap 42.3, Leap 15, Tumbleweed and SLE15 are shipping SaltStack 2018.3.0. But this will change in the future, because Tumbleweed will move on. Leap 15 and SLE 15 will both stick to the same version, which is 2018.3.0. I know that this was different in the past. But this caused confusion and there is no good reason for having a different version in Leap and SLE.

But don't let the version numbers fool you. We are still pulling in bugfixes and even backport important features if we need them.

How to get changes in?

This is the easy part. Just do it upstream. And if the changes got merged upstream, create a pull request in the openSUSE/salt GitHub repository. Just cherry pick your change from upstream and squash all commits into one.

You can also do this for upstream changes you think should be in the openSUSE package. I can't guarantee that everything will be accepted. But just try it!

What is already in?

Previously I've mentioned that even though we are shipping version 2018.3.0 of SaltStack, we don't just stick to the dot-release. The SaltStack dot-release is just the base the openSUSE SaltStack package is build on. That's why there are already 25 patches coming with that package. In the spec file you can even find the links to the upstream pull requests. This is an easy way to keep track of what got fixed and what you might want to cherry pick from upstream. ;)

Currently the patch list looks like this:

Patch1:        run-salt-master-as-dedicated-salt-user.patch
Patch2:        run-salt-api-as-user-salt-bsc-1064520.patch
Patch3:        activate-all-beacons-sources-config-pillar-grains.patch
Patch4:        avoid-excessive-syslogging-by-watchdog-cronjob-58.patch
Patch5:        feat-add-grain-for-all-fqdns.patch
Patch6:        fix-bsc-1065792.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/46006
Patch7:        remove-obsolete-unicode-handling-in-pkg.info_install.patch
Patch8:        fix-openscap-push.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/45972
Patch9:        move-log_file-option-to-changeable-defaults.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/46416
Patch10:       fix-cp.push-empty-file.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/46575
Patch11:       fix-decrease-loglevel-when-unable-to-resolve-addr.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/46643
Patch12:       make-it-possible-to-use-login-pull-and-push-from-mod.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/46413
Patch13:       explore-module.run-response-to-catch-the-result-in-d.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/46684
Patch14:       add-saltssh-multi-version-support-across-python-inte.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/46635
Patch15:       fix-for-errno-0-resolver-error-0-no-error-bsc-108758.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/46890
Patch16:       fall-back-to-pymysql.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/47149
Patch17:       strip-trailing-commas-on-linux-user-gecos-fields.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/47155
Patch18:       provide-kwargs-to-pkg_resource.parse_targets-require.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/47270
Patch19:       initialize-__context__-retcode-for-functions-handled.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/47232
Patch20:       fixed-usage-of-ipaddress.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/47497
Patch21:       extra-filerefs-include-files-even-if-no-refs-in-stat.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/47504
Patch22:       option-to-merge-current-pillar-with-opts-pillar-duri.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/47471
Patch23:       do-not-override-jid-on-returners-only-sending-back-t.patch
# PATCH-FIX_OPENSUSE bsc#1091371
Patch24:       enable-passing-a-unix_socket-for-mysql-returners-bsc.patch
# PATCH-FIX_UPSTREAM https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/47211
Patch25:       fix-for-ec2-rate-limit-failures.patch

I hope you enjoyed this little overview. Just ping me on freenode#suse if you've got questions or suggestions. My nick is brejoc.

Have fun and happy hacking!