upgrading RH 9 system->Fedora with iso files and apt only
by Didier Casse
I have the yarrow's iso files on my HD in a RH9 system. Let's say I want
to upgrade selected packages using an "apt-get install" pointing to my
iso-mounted files, how do I do it?
i.e I mount the iso into some /mnt/yarrow1, /mnt/yarrow 2 etc..
Then what is the complete procedure to make my apt look into my own HD to
upgrade packages. Can anybody redirect me to the correct
resource or some literature hanging on the web? Thanks.
Assume also that I do not wish to burn CDs! I do not want to use
apt-cdrom. Thanks.
With kind regards,
Didier.
---
PhD student
Singapore Synchrotron Light Source (SSLS)
5 Research Link,
Singapore 117603
Email: slsbdfc at nus dot edu dot sg \or\
didierbe at sps dot nus dot edu dot sg
Website: http://ssls.nus.edu.sg
3 months, 4 weeks
pdftk retired?
by Michael J Gruber
I just git a "broken dependencies" notice for a package that I maintain.
The reason is that "pdftk" got retired just the other day.
I may have missed a corresponding post on fedora-devel, but I think a
heads up notice to maintainers of depending packages may be in order
before you retire a package, as a general idea.
You see, unretiring a package is so much more work than changing
maintainership.
As for pdftk: I see 2 failed builds for version 1.45 and none for the
current version 2.02 (which probably breaks the api anyways). What are
the plans? Retire pdftk completely? Start fresh with pdftk2?
pdflabs, the maker of pdftk, provide binary as well as source rpms for
pdftk 2.02, by the way. I might even look into packaging it but don't
want to duplicate any existing efforts.
Michael
8 months, 1 week
apitrace, bundled libbacktrace
by Sandro Mani
Hi,
apitrace 5.0 bundles libbacktrace, which looks like is living within the
gcc sources. libbacktrace is not build as a shared library from the gcc
sources, and not packaged.
Is it feasible to build libbacktrace as a shared library and ship it in
a corresponding package? Or should I rather go for a bundling exception
request?
Thanks,
Sandro
4 years, 5 months
whatever happened to yum + btrfs snapshotting?
by Neal Becker
Some time back there was discussion of being able to rollback yum updates via
btrfs snapshotting. As I recall, it turned out that the default btrfs install
was not setup correctly to make this feasible (I had briefly tested it on my
machine). I haven't heard anything since - this seems like a great idea.
--
-- Those who don't understand recursion are doomed to repeat it
5 years, 2 months
Validity of i686 as a release blocker
by Josh Boyer
Hello,
Over the past week, we've been dealing with a kernel bug[1] that
prevents i686 machines from booting. Help was requested and given,
and it has been excellent and most welcome. This email has no
reflection on that, and is instead focused on the reality of where
i686 stands today.
In February[2] we sent out an email highlighting that the kernel team
was not going to treat i686 bugs as a priority. Since that time, we
have held true to our word and have not focused on fixing i686 bugs at
all. It seems that the wider community is also treating i686
similarly. The kernel bug that was made automatic blocker because of
existing criteria was present in Fedora since the 4.1-rc6 kernel,
which was released May 31. It has been in every boot.iso created
since that date. Not a single person reported this issue until last
week. That is a timespan of two months.
The kernel team has autotesting for i686 kernels, but the environment
there does not utilize boot.iso so it did not detect this. The QA
team has automated testing for some of this, but nothing for the i686
architecture at all. It is not a priority there either.
Perhaps it is time that we evaluate where i686 stands in Fedora more
closely. For a starting suggestion, I would recommend that we do not
treat it as a release blocking architecture. This is not the same as
demotion to secondary architecture status. That has broader
implications in both buildsys and ecosystem. My suggestion is
narrowly focused so that builds still proceed as today, but if there
is something broken for i686 it does not block the release of whatever
milestone we are pursuing.
(To be clear, I would support a move to secondary arch status for
i686, but I am not suggesting it at this time.)
Making i686 non-release blocking would actually match reality. None
of the Fedora Editions appear at all concerned with i686. Cloud is
demoting[3] i686 from its offering. Workstation has been fairly
ambivalent about it and recommends x86_64. Server does the same.
Given the lack of focus on it, and the fact that the broader community
is not testing the development releases for i686, I believe this would
be a good first step.
josh
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1247382
[2] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2015-February/208368.html
[3] https://fedorahosted.org/cloud/ticket/106
6 years
OCaml plans on POWER7/POWER8 (ppc64, ppc64le) in Rawhide
by Richard W.M. Jones
OCaml is a statically-safe programming language derived from ML which
compiles to very fast native code. It contains native code backends
for most architectures (all Fedora primary & secondary arches except
s/390x in fact).
Currently Fedora downstream carries two non-upstream backends:
For ppc64 (big endian), a backend was written many years ago by David
Woodhouse and was upstream for a time, but was dropped when the
PlayStation 3 stopped supporting Linux. For ppc64le (little endian /
POWER8) IBM's Michel Normand contributed a native code backend last
year. The upstream project always carried a ppc (32 bit) backend, but
we didn't use it and it's not very interesting for us.
https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/fedora-ocaml.git/log/?h=fedora-24-4.02
Red Hat and IBM have provided help and loaned equipment to the
upstream project, and as a result upstream have now added ppc64 and
ppc64le backends. This work was merged at the end of August. These
backends were inspired by the Red Hat & IBM work but are not
derivatives. For details see:
https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/225
So what I want to do is add the new backends [actually it's a single,
combined and extended ppc/ppc64/ppc64le backend] to Fedora Rawhide,
and drop our non-upstream backends.
I have so far cherry-picked the merge commit on top of our Fedora
OCaml tree, and I have dropped the downstream ppc64/ppc64le commits
from our tree. (This is not pushed yet so doesn't appear in the
git.fedorahosted.org link above.)
I have tested it on ppc64le to check that the compiler compiles
itself. A scratch build of the compiler with the new backend is here
(I reserve the right to make further changes, this is just a
preliminary test build):
http://ppc.koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=2741551
I used this to compile some ocaml-* packages on ppc64le, with -- it
has to be said -- mixed results. There are two compiler bugs
revealed. This compiler won't be able to compile all the ocaml-*
packages on POWER. However because of the depth of dependencies, I
cannot easily do scratch builds to find out which packages will be
broken.
Hence I'd like to do a full rebuild, again, to see what breaks. This
*shouldn't affect primary architectures at all*, but will probably
leave some broken ocaml-* packages on the ppc64/ppc64le secondary
arches.
We've actually done two complete rebuilds during the F24 development
cycle already, which in a way is good because it means I know how long
it should take, and I'm confident that the scripts I use will work
again:
http://git.annexia.org/?p=goals.git;a=blob;f=fedora_ocaml_rebuild.ml;h=13...
So I'm pretty confident the primary arch rebuild will go fine, since
it's not affected by any of the above changes - it's basically just a
release bump. We don't even need to use a side tag for this because
the "old" and "new" packages can be mixed on x86 - they are the same.
The plan for ppc64/ppc64le would then be to fix the bugs revealed in
the rebuild with upstream help.
Any comments?
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows programs, test, and
build Windows installers. Over 100 libraries supported.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW
6 years, 2 months
Fedora 23 cloud image (and, for that matter, minimal anything) bloat
by Matthew Miller
Fedora-Cloud-Base-20141203-21.x86_64.qcow2: 151M
Fedora-Cloud-Base-23_Beta-20150915.x86_64.qcow2: 275M
In just one year — 82% more awesome?
I'd really like this to stay below 200MB as a competitive threshold.
Or, if we're going to be bigger than that, be bigger for REASONS, not
just accretion.
tl;dr: grub2 is a lot to blame, but there seem to be some new
questionable dep chains from systemd, and general dep growth across the
board.
Disk use at first boot:
[f21]$ df -h /
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1 20G 359M 19G 2% /
[f23b]$ df -h /
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1 20G 578M 19G 4% /
RPMs installed:
[f21]$ rpm -qa | wc -l
226
[f23b]$ rpm -qa | wc -l
264
Top 20 rpms by reported size:
$ rpm -qa --qf '%{size} %{name}\n'|sort -nr|head -20
120417342 glibc-common
42307839 kernel-core
25000497 python-libs
22438155 systemd
14623272 coreutils
14000291 glibc
11282056 ruby-libs # hey, at least we lost this
10845519 glib2
10593004 selinux-policy-targeted
9389116 cracklib-dicts # https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=865521
9078043 python-boto
8792531 util-linux
7084188 bash
6669884 gnupg2
5844544 yum
4893790 policycoreutils
3786564 file-libs
3540004 shadow-utils
3458312 groff-base # who doesn't love groff?
2997717 tar
$ rpm -qa --qf '%{size} %{name}\n'|sort -nr|head -20
125195206 glibc-common
86298752 linux-firmware # sadface, but hard
53291365 kernel-core
36004297 grub2-tools # this is ridiculous
28453336 python3-libs # 13% growth
27233273 systemd # 21% growth
16648994 grub2 # *sigh*
14486819 glibc
14287847 coreutils # this package got _smaller!_
11143743 glib2
11129880 selinux-policy-targeted
9389116 cracklib-dicts
9261499 python3-boto
9237998 util-linux
9224255 fedora-logos # this is also grub's fault.
7517574 gnupg2
7143418 bash
6574678 python3-pip # :(
5888883 hwdata # this is ALSO grub's fault
5423400 xkeyboard-config # really???? looks like a systemd dep chain
involving plymouth
Okay, let's look on disk:
[f21]$ sudo du -sh * 2>/dev/null|sort -h
[...]
36K home
40K root
228K run
21M boot
22M etc
34M var
276M usr
[f23b]$ sudo du -sh * 2>/dev/null|sort -h
[...]
40K root
264K run
16M etc
45M boot # ugh
171M var # oww
463M usr # oww oww oww
Breakdown:
- boot is mostly grub, but initramfs is also doubled
- var: DNF cache is full of stuff! 123M... oh, hey, that wasn't
there when we booted. `df -h /` is now up to 702M. Maybe multiple
repos would help here, or some other more clever design. Does
every cloud image in the world _really_ need to replicate
dependency data so I can `dnf install
/usr/share/minetest/builtin/mainmenu/init_simple.lua`?
- usr:
* linux-firmware is the biggest thing here
* python3 is another good chunk
* also kernel modules, but, eh, whatchagonnado
* oh, and of course, grub2.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
6 years, 5 months
