QA process was Re: RPM submission procedure

Lamar Owen lowen at pari.edu
Fri Jan 9 22:34:29 UTC 2004


On Friday 09 January 2004 04:47 pm, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 16:32:49 -0500, Karl DeBisschop wrote:
> > What I'm suggesting is that if every distro has entirely separate specs,
> > you are tending torward these sorts of conflicts. But if the distros are
> > less insistent that a spec is for their distro alone, then we have less
> > tendency to diverge.

> Fine. Get all distributors to agree on common package naming guidelines,
> on a common set of RPM macros, on a common set of helper tools, etc. etc.

That will happen about the same time that all packages become trivial to 
package.

This is one area that I know very well, having built PostgreSQL RPMs for 
several versions on many different distributions.  Even among historical Red 
Hat versions there are issues.  For several reasons my PostgreSQL packages 
need to be able to build on Red Hats 6.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9, AS 2.1, and EL3.  As 
well as building on Aurora 1.0 (which is virtually the same thing as building 
on RH7.3, just on SPARC) and Fedora Core.  This means that there is a mess, 
thanks to Red Hat's own inconsistencies (such as krb5 directory, the presence 
of krb5 at all, amongst others).  So I get into a situation of passing 
command line parameters telling the spec file what to do.  Autoselecting the 
distro is more difficult, but less time consuming for the build.

I _have_ made packages for older PostgreSQL that built without command line 
parameters or specfile edits on all of Caldera, SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake, and 
TurboLinux.  More recent PostgreSQL is more friendly to packaging in many 
ways, but it is far from trivial.  At least that perl client was pulled out; 
it required building as root due to broken makemaker installations on older 
Red Hat and other dists.  Now I have better packages; still could use some 
work, but better.

Karl might have been meaning me when he alluded to upstream RPM packagers, 
which I am.  He has helped me a great deal in that packaging.  I remember the 
nightmare of PostgreSQL packaging that I picked up in summer of 1999.  It's a 
little better now: most distributions at least synchronize every so often, 
and I try to pull in the best of the individual distribution's patches and 
ideas.  Mandrake does things so differently that I don't bother looking at 
theirs; SuSE likewise due to significant differences.  I could make a fully 
cross-distribution spec (as I _have_ done this for hire before), but it would 
be a feeping creaturistic kludge of the first magnitude.  So I make as 
generic a package as I can that I personally can use, which in practice means 
it has a Red Hat flavor.  I then post it and let people do with it what they 
may.

But there is a great deal of NotInventedHere between distributions.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu





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