wish to resurrect shorewall on EPEL 6 (and re-self-introduction)

[J. Randall Owens]

As I previously wrote (v.i.), I'd like to un-retire shorewall for EPEL
6. It seems as though the only reason for its retirement is that the
previous maintainer hadn't updated it in four years, presumably having
lost interest in it. I've had shorewall-4.5.4 & -4.4.17 building in my
personal repo for a while now, and in use on my servers, so it doesn't
seem there's any build problem that precludes it from (EP)EL6.

If there's no objection, I'll file the releng ticket. If there's a
simple shortcut in git for reverting the dead.package file to the
shorewall.spec etc., I'd appreciate knowing it; otherwise, I'll muddle
through the git checkout/push somehow, I suppose.

And since it's been a long time since I introduced myself, without my
contributing much since then, it can serve as a bit of a
re-introduction, as well.


-------- Forwarded Message --------
To: Michele Baldessari <michele [AT] acksyn [DOT] org>
From: J. Randall Owens <jrowens.fedora(a)ghiapet.net&gt;
Subject: wish to resurrect shorewall on EPEL 6
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2017 01:26:46 +0100

Hello. I've been a mostly-quiet Fedora user and occasional minor
contributor for a fair while now, certainly over a decade (and RHL
before that), and I love my shorewall, and I have a few CentOS 6 servers
to tend to. Some of these being new to me, I found that they already had
shorewall & shorewall-core on them, so I went to add shorewall6 to the
mix, and after some puzzled moments, realised that it was all gone from
the EPEL repository. So, I'd like to bring it back for EPEL 6, and
figured I should run it past you first, see if there was a particular
reason for retiring it, or if it was just that you didn't have the
interest in 6 in particular.

I've already been in the Fedora CLA, Git Commit, etc. groups for a while
now [1], after I had some plans for packages that never materialised.
Most recently, I took on gogoc (also networking- & IPv6-related) in a
hurry before it would be automatically retired, only to discover that
the tunnel service it was intended to connect to was going defunct, so
not much point to keeping it afloat. A couple of other packages, though,
I had good intentions for, but just never got the hang of how to go
through the right combination of bodhi, koji, pkgdb, pungi, plague,
copr, or whatever else for Fedora/EPEL. So if you're willing to let me
take on EPEL 6, and walk me through a build or two so I can see how it's
done (and take notes), that would be wonderful.

I've had my own repository of a handful of packages since Fedora 9 [2],
basically just for my own use, so I know the packaging side of things
pretty well, and using mock. And I know a bit of git, somewhat narrowly,
but reasonably well. Using branches is a weak area for me; I haven't
done that much yet, and as I understand it, I think that might be
important for this, although I guess there's just a branch per
Fedora/EPEL release, and there isn't further branching after that,
right? I seem to see that there were tags per version up through 4.4.10,
and then they stopped, and I don't know if that was due to a policy
change, or just personal preference of a (possibly new) maintainer.
Anyway, if you're willing, we can sort that out later.

If we can do this, I expect we should keep it at 4.x, and not make the
jump to 5.x, this being EPEL. Any opinion on whether 4.6.y would be
reasonable? Looks like the last one was 4.5.4, so could go either 4.5.21
or 4.6.13, if playing it safe. If you don't have an opinion yet, I can
look into the 4.6 changes and see whether it's likely to negatively
affect existing installations.

Thank you for your time, and for keeping the Fedora and EPEL 7 branches
of shorewall alive (which I also use, on the home machines).

[1] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/user/view/jrowens
[2] http://download.ghiapet.net/pub/ghiapet/linux/


-- 
J. Randall Owens | http://www.GhiaPet.net/