Re: How do Fedora developers get access to devtoolset for testing.

[Steven Munroe]

Dave Love; writes:
...
>  I'm pretty sure I said to do that a while ago, like I did when
>  testing the trivial patch that I didn't expect to cause such trouble. 
You probably did say so ;)

I come from a different culture and experience. I am not as conversant
in Fedorian as I should be. So I tend to misunderstand what is plain
to you all.

From my experience, installing (something like) devtoolset on Fedora
was not an outlandish idea, Apparently it is.

So installing a centos 7 VM instance on my local power8 seems like a
better option.

Thanks

How do Fedora developers get access to devtoolset for testing.

[Fabio Valentini]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2020 at 12:14 AM Steven Munroe <munroesj52(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  Dave Love; writes:
>  ...
>  > I'm pretty sure I said to do that a while ago, like I did when
>  > testing the trivial patch that I didn't expect to cause such trouble.
>
>  You probably did say so ;)
>
>  I come from a different culture and experience. I am not as conversant
>  in Fedorian as I should be. So I tend to misunderstand what is plain
>  to you all.
>
>  From my experience, installing (something like) devtoolset on Fedora
>  was not an outlandish idea, Apparently it is.
>
>  So installing a centos 7 VM instance on my local power8 seems like a
>  better option. 
Why not use mock, with something like `mock -r epel-7-ppc64(le)`?
It gives you a clean EPEL 7 build environment ... and you can shell
into it, if you need to debug something (`mock -r epel-7-ppc64(le)
shell`). Much easier (and faster?) than a separate VM?

Fabio

How do Fedora developers get access to devtoolset for testing.

[Jonathan Wakely]

On 21/07/20 17:12 -0500, Steven Munroe wrote:
> Dave Love; writes:
> ...
> > I'm pretty sure I said to do that a while ago, like I did when
> > testing the trivial patch that I didn't expect to cause such trouble.
>
> You probably did say so ;)
>
> I come from a different culture and experience. I am not as conversant
> in Fedorian as I should be. So I tend to misunderstand what is plain
> to you all.
>
> From my experience, installing (something like) devtoolset on Fedora
> was not an outlandish idea, Apparently it is. 
It's not about devtoolset. Installing CentOS 7 RPMs on Fedora rawhide
is outlandish. It won't work in general, because the CentOS RPMs have
dependencies on CentOS packages, and Fedora has different versions.

CentOS and Fedora are different distros.

> So installing a centos 7 VM instance on my local power8 seems like a
> better option. 
Or just use mock, as has been said several times.

Simply 'fedpkg --release epel7 mockbuild' in the dist-git repo will do
everything correctly for you.

How do Fedora developers get access to devtoolset for testing.

[Florian Weimer]

* Jonathan Wakely:

>  It's not about devtoolset. Installing CentOS 7 RPMs on Fedora
> rawhide
>  is outlandish. It won't work in general, because the CentOS RPMs have
>  dependencies on CentOS packages, and Fedora has different versions. 
Steven has a point, though.  For software not built by Red Hat,
installing RPMs on Fedora works most of the time even if they have been
packaged for the enterprise downstreams (or vice versa, sometimes the
intended user base is not entirely clear).

Thanks,
Florian

How do Fedora developers get access to devtoolset for testing.

[Jonathan Wakely]

On 29/07/20 10:23 +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Jonathan Wakely:
>
> > It's not about devtoolset. Installing CentOS 7 RPMs on Fedora rawhide
> > is outlandish. It won't work in general, because the CentOS RPMs have
> > dependencies on CentOS packages, and Fedora has different versions.
>
> Steven has a point, though.  For software not built by Red Hat,
> installing RPMs on Fedora works most of the time even if they have been
> packaged for the enterprise downstreams (or vice versa, sometimes the
> intended user base is not entirely clear). 
Yes, third-party packagers usually want to minimise the number of
builds they have to do, and ship a package that works across as many
versions of a distro as possible. e.g. they just provide an rpm and a
.deb and those are expected to work on any RPM-based distro or any
Debian-derived distro that is sufficiently recent, maybe with a .tar.gz
containing a standalone binary for everything else that doesn't use
rpm or dpkg.

That's sometimes done via static linking, and/or bundling dependencies
in the package.

But packages from the Fedora and CentOS repos are generally specific
to that distro, usually even a specific version of that distro. Each
package can be (and usually is) rebuilt and re-packaged as needed for
each distro release. We don't need to build it once and have it keep
working on later releaases, because we have a separate repo for each
release and we have build systems that rebuild everything. And we
don't want to use static linking or bundling.

So yes, that's a significant difference between third-party packages
(minimise dependencies for portability) and packages from the distro's
own repos (minimise bundling for maintainability and security).

How do Fedora developers get access to devtoolset for testing.

[Dave Love]

Steven Munroe <munroesj52(a)gmail.com&gt; writes:

>  I come from a different culture and experience. I am not as
> conversant
>  in Fedorian as I should be. So I tend to misunderstand what is plain
>  to you all. 
Really, it's nothing specific to Fedora.  The same would apply to any
GNU/Linux distro (or other OS with a typical packaging system without a
robust backwards compatibility story).

>  From my experience, installing (something like) devtoolset on Fedora
>  was not an outlandish idea, Apparently it is. 
It surprises me if that's IBM experience, and it's a bit worrying for
our new system.

>  So installing a centos 7 VM instance on my local power8 seems like a
>  better option. 
Really, it isn't necessary, any more than it was for me on the Fedora
development system.  I run VMs for Fedora development, but that's
because I'm personally a Debian user, and I don't think Debian has the
relevant tools available, apart from some version of mock.  You do
sometimes need a VM when the kernel matters, but not most of the time.
(The container support that's now in mock does allow me to build for
rawhide or EL8 on RHEL7 -- thanks to whoever implemented that -- not
just the other way round.)  Is this sort of thing not clear in the
packager documentation coming from cold?  If not, I guess someone would
improve it.