Update PANDA?

[Mike Stucka]

Anyone interested in getting a platform update for PANDA soon after Ubuntu 16.04 drops in a few months? The existing image is only 32-bit and doesn't support most newer AWS instances. The existing Ubuntu install will be out of support mid-2017, so this would buy another four years.

Most of the dependencies are presumably rather out-of-date also.

Might be worth a little aside at NICAR2016?

Mike

--

Mike Stucka
stu...@whitedoggies.com
(478) 213-4742 cell

26.58584, -80.16876 icbm
“A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.” -- Mitch Ratcliffe

[Serdar Tumgoren]

I'd be interested in chatting about this at NICAR.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PANDA Project Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to panda-project-u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Christopher Groskopf]

I'd be happy to be in this conversation as an adviser, but I'm honestly the wrong person to be maintaining things at this point since I'm not using PANDA, and haven't in several years.

[Joe Germuska]

Yes, we should have a PANDA BOF at NICAR, with a priority on making sure that people who are invested in it have the power to keep it strong without the original team adding friction. None of us actually use it, so... such is life!

Closer to the date, we'll either send a doodle around this list or otherwise conspire to get folks together.

Joe

Joe Germuska
J...@Germuska.com * http://blog.germuska.com   

"I felt so good I told the leader how to follow."
-- Sly Stone

[Mike Stucka]

Is it worth talking about what's actually needed here? Things I've thought about:

-- A shift to a newer OS, presumably testing with Ubuntu Server 15.10 as a route to 16.04 LTS.

-- A shift to a 64-bit OS

-- A shift from EOL Amazon images

-- OS changes bringing changes in baseline software, e.g., significantly newer versions with Postgres, SOLR, nginx, Django

-- A fun one: I think Ubuntu's default Python interpreter may be changing over to 3.5 with 16.04 LTS. I'm guessing it'd be worlds simpler to force PANDA to use Python 2.7 instead of trying to rewrite for 3.5. Rewriting might make sense if there were a significant demand for new features or bug fixes and significant resources to actually handle a conversion. I'm not aware of either. Python 2.7 support is supposed to continue through 2020. OTOH, that's four years off and we're halfway there.

-- Another review of automated maintenance (e.g., failure to have apt-get autoremove crontabbed has killed some installs because inodes run out; I think that problem has been fixed in newer versions of Ubuntu.)

I'm tempted to make a pitch in the next few days for a Mizzou fellowship to try to update PANDA and continue development of some other tools, but I strongly suspect I'm shouldn't be the guy taking lead on this.

Mike

[Matt Clark]

We use this a ton at Newsday, and I'm happy to dedicate what little time I have available to help with coding. Unfortunately, I am no help on the systems administration side. It will be tough enough for me just to upgrade if PANDA is moved to a newer OS.

I wanted to throw out a little concern though before a lot of work is put into upgrading to supported code. Right now, PANDA works pretty well. One bug that is frustrating is that results pagination breaks with any complex query, but this would not be a difficult thing to fix. However, an upgrade might introduce a whole new set of bugs, no? I know there will be testing, but just wanted to throw this out there. I'm probably not understanding all the reasons to perform this type of upgrade, but I'm coming from the position of if it ain't broke don't fix it.

Also, couldn't someone get a new grant to update the code or to add new features?

[Joe Germuska]

OK, folks, time to set a schedule. 

I'm going to be responsible for scheduling an in-person confab in Denver to discuss the future of PANDA. If you want to participate, drop me an email with any hard schedule constraints you have. Hopefully I'll just be able to set a time by Wednesday (decent chance it'll be during lunch on Thursday or Friday, but we'll see how many folks speak up and how willing they are to miss other sessions).

If you are invested in PANDA but will not be at CAR in Denver, please speak up. We'll do our best to take your interests and needs into account.

As I think has become clear, none of the original PANDA project team are using the tool. If current users want to pick up the torch, we are happy to work to transition things as best we can.

Looking forward to hearing from you

   Joe 

On Tuesday, January 26, 2016 at 3:57:21 PM UTC-6, Joe Germuska wrote:

Yes, we should have a PANDA BOF at NICAR, with a priority on making sure that people who are invested in it have the power to keep it strong without the original team adding friction. None of us actually use it, so... such is life!

Closer to the date, we'll either send a doodle around this list or otherwise conspire to get folks together.

Joe

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 7:40 PM, Christopher Groskopf  wrote:

I'd be happy to be in this conversation as an adviser, but I'm honestly the wrong person to be maintaining things at this point since I'm not using PANDA, and haven't in several years.

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 6:03 PM, Serdar Tumgoren wrote:

I'd be interested in chatting about this at NICAR.