On Fri, 7 Jan 2011 13:44:04 -0800, brett lentz brett.lentz@gmail.com wrote:
Is there any reason Cobbler can't ship these loaders in its own rpm or via sub-package? (copyright, file size, etc.) Expecting users of Cobbler to hit fedorapeople.org for pieces of the software strikes me as a sub-optimal design and doesn't account for those who have strict firewalls or proxies or no connection at all between their provisioning equipment and the internet.
I've not looked into this myself, but I was told by Dehaan that it was due to Fedora policy. We would have to ship binaries in our source that were not built from the original sources. As I understand things, that would be unacceptable. So, the only solution was to provide an out of band method of retrieving the file. Hence, the fedorapeople site. I don't know any other solution that would pass muster with respect to Fedora policy.
I suspect the ideal solution is keeping all things that are required to run Cobbler in all supported configurations in one place; for rpm-based installs, that place tends to be within the rpm. An optional sub-package(s) sounds like the right answer to me. In the interest of having support centralized as far upstream as possible (i.e. in Cobbler, not just in Satellite or Spacewalk), having packages named something along the lines of "cobbler-s390", "cobbler-ppc", etc. is probably ideal, but even just a single "cobbler-other-arches" sub-package might be sufficient.
As I said above, we are unable to do that when packaged for Fedora and EPEL. However, this would be the ideal solution for Satellite.