[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Introduction: Jeroen van Meeuwen (Fedora Project)

[Dan Scott]

On Tue, 2009-11-17 at 10:42 +0100, Jeroen van Meeuwen (Fedora Project)
wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> please allow me to first introduce myself, before I go crazy and submit 
> patches to establish my goals with Evergreen Open ILS and OpenSRF ;-)

I'm looking forward to the craziness :) Note that we're running an open
Launchpad instance at http://launchpad.net/evergreen if you want to add
patches / bug reports / etc right away.

> My name is Jeroen van Meeuwen, and I live in the Netherlands. During the 
> day I work as a Senior System Engineer for a consultancy company called 
> Operator Groep Delft (www.ogd.nl - Dutch), and my hobby and greatest 
> passion is Free Software and Free Culture. I am in the very lucky 
> position to have had that hobby and passion become part of my job as well.

Are you aware that the International Institute for Social History
(located in Amsterdam) is interested in Evergreen? Repke de Vries has
been active on the Evergreen lists; you might want to contact them if
you haven't already.

> As such, I heavily participate in the Fedora Project, or in Free 
> Software through the Fedora Project depending on how you look at it, 
> through which we try and get the latest and greatest in Free Software be 
> in a sort-of-consistent distribution, which we then release every 6 
> months. One of the very awesome examples of it's success is the fact 
> that the not-so-humble Red Hat Enterprise Linux is practically a full 
> derivative, downstream distribution of Fedora -if you would like me to 
> explain that statement please let me know.
> 
> If I were to list bullet points of what I do within the Fedora Project 
> people would get bored pretty quickly, so let me just emphasize that of 
> most common interest between the Evergreen project and my involvement 
> with Fedora so far is the fact that I package software. My goal is to 
> get the Evergreen Open ILS and OpenSRF packaged for Fedora, as well as 
> Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux[1].

Awesome. Better packaging is one of the frequently requested
enhancements for Evergreen and OpenSRF, but to date it hasn't been a
priority for the current developers because we (frankly) lack the
skills. Equinox employed Kevin Beswick in the summer of 2008 to get us
to a basic autotools configuration, but it really needs improvement to
support a broader set of distributions and install locations.

You might have seen the nascent attempts at adding CentOS as a target
for the Makefile.install OpenSRF and Evergreen dependency installers; I
was taking a stab at that ages ago, but when we adopted Evergreen as our
production system I dropped that effort to focus on our core
functionality needs. It would be great to see improved
Fedora/RHEL/CentOS support - there are a few other people on the list
who have installed Evergreen on RHEL that might be able to share their
experiences with you.

> I'm looking forward to meet you all, especially the other RHEL/CentOS 
> enthusiasts, and working with you all to make the Evergreen Open 
> ILS/OpenSRF even greater ;-)

Great to meet you too!