Mike Bonnet wrote:
Hi. I've written up a proposal for a way to support EPEL builds
in
Koji. It's not the only way we could do this, but I think it's doable
with a reasonable amount of effort, and has the side-effect of greatly
simplifying the Koji setup process for a lot of people (by removing the
need to bootstrap/import an entire distro of packages into your private
Koji instance). You can view the proposal here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Koji/EPELSupport
It's fairly detailed regarding the data model changes necessary, so if
you're not familiar with the Koji codebase you can skip those parts.
Questions and comments welcome.
Hi Mike,
good to see you've spend some time on this whereas I have been lazy in
Littleton (holiday).
I'd like to share a few thoughts on the Wiki page -which is a great start;
From the Wiki page: "There is a strong feeling that if a package exists
in the Koji-managed local repo (whose contents the Koji admin has full
control over) it should always be preferred over the external repo
(whose contents the Koji admin may have little or no control over)."
The preference koji will have (in using which package in the buildroot),
might introduce the problem where customly built package foo-1.0 is used
in the buildroot, and upstream updates to foo-1.1 - the running nodes
would update to foo-1.1 whereas the buildroot still uses the custom
foo-1.0...
The point being, that these updates have to managed as they are
released. The updates need to managed on the side where said packages
are being mashed into a repository (infra side) or applied (client side).
You can see the duplicate effort when the updates are managed on either
side (infra or client), _and_ in koji, separately.
I would like to suggest the koji development team makes the priority
setting koji is going to use a configurable item -which in compared to
the bigger picture isn't all that much a priority, just something to
think about.
Additionally, I'd like to comment on / ask about the proposed database
changes for the tag_config table; In an attempt to show you what I was
thinking, here's a number of questions;
From the Wiki page: "At repo creation time, the repodata will be
retrieved from the processed url and merged with the local repodata as
described above. This single repo will then be used for subsequent
builds against the tag"
Do I understand correctly one can only give one single repository URL to
a certain tag? Does this mean that a tag is created for (example)
"dist-el5" with a remote repository URL, and then "dist-el5-updates"
with another remote repository URL? This means for the build target used
to have dist-el5-updates inherit dist-el5, right? Which then implies
either metadata needs to be imported for dist-el5-updates or inheritance
can only be applied during build-time... right?
The question I guess is basically; how does koji handle tags with a
combination of remote urls & inheritance?
From the Wiki page: "Right now that (rpminfo) table enforces uniqueness
of (name, version, release, arch)."
I see that koji does not store complete package nevra which may become a
problem in case duplicate nvra occur (which is very much likely the case
where rebuilding packages with the release number bumped might collide
with upstream doing a release bump -which is where the epoch is often
used as upstream has clear guidelines for epoch bumps which -hopefully-
make them occur in special circumstances only and thus very much reduces
the chance of a colliding nevra). I like the proposed uniqueness of
NVRA-namespaces as well, don't get me wrong ;-)
The other thing (and probably the last thing for now) I'd like to share
is that, for reproducibility purposes, how viable would it be to have
koji automatically import the remote RPM (the file and all the data) as
it is used from the remote repository? This may or may not be a
configurable option, saves work for admins compared to the situation
now, and preserves reproducibility under all circumstances, adding the
automatically imported RPM to the appropriate tags, storing them for
reproducibility whereas upstream only keeps two versions in the
repository... Though I understand it 1) consumes space and 2) isn't
helpful for the EPEL case, I think this is particularly useful for
long-term supported appliance software. Just wondering here ;-)
Let me know what you think,
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip