what do you want to know about EPEL?

[Matthew Dahlman]

Karsten,

I'm a little late to the thread here, but I have a few thoughts to add.

The approach that you've described sounds good. Explaining why one would
want to do "whatever it takes to get software in to RPM" would be really
useful for me. Likewise, it will be very useful for me to understand not
just 'why' but also 'how'. The details of how to get software package X
into RPM form are clearly beyond the scope of one session, but learning
the high-level version of how to do this and documenting where to get
further info would be great.

I'd also like to learn clear definitions of what it means for a package to
"be in EPEL" and to "be in Fedora". It seems simple enough... but then I
try to explain it to someone else and find that I can't explain it
precisely. If I can't explain it well, then I guess I didn't know it well
in the first place. 

Actually, it's perhaps useful if I explain my position. Maybe others are
in similar situations. My company has relatively little experience with
Fedora, but we're very interested in learning about getting our
JasperServer product into EPEL. I'd love to get a better feel for what
skills we need to do this. I don't have RPM experience, what sites or
books might help bring me up to speed quickest in this area? Our app needs
an app server; how should I lookup what app servers are already supported
in Fedora? Same for databases. 

I guess by the nature of your talk you would start with questions like,
"What is EPEL?". For me, I'd certainly like it if you start with simple
questions like this just to make sure that we all have the same
foundational knowledge. I began by reading "(EPEL) is a volunteer-based
community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of
high-quality add-on packages that complement ..." While this is no doubt
accurate, I didn't find it intuitively clear. Covering basic things like
this in the session would be great.

Regards,
Matt Dahlman
JasperSoft
 

-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-isv-sig-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:fedora-isv-sig-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Karsten
'quaid' Wade
Sent: Thursday, 12 June, 2008 8:09
To: fedora-isv-sig-list at redhat.com
Subject: what do you want to know about EPEL?

I'm doing the final work on my presentation on EPEL[1] at the Red Hat
Summit, and I'm wondering if there any questions you all have I should
address?

Generally, the approach is to describe what EPEL is (and what it isn't),
and the various reasons why it is an important enough goal to warrant
doing whatever it takes to get software in to RPM.

Also, I'm going to touch upon some of the new work we are doing to enable
ISVs to be successful -- this SIG, the other sessions at the Summit and
FUDCon, etc.

Let me know if there is anything you'd want to hear more of, less of, etc.

thx - Karsten
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
--
Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr.
Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com
Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
gpg key : AD0E0C41