[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Packaging Update

[Ben Webb]

Apologies for the lack of noise from the evergreen packaging front.
Since most of what I've been doing is separate from the actual
Evergreen and OpenSRF codebases I have been pushing it to its own
Gitorious repo[1]. (Although this maybe should belong on
git.evergreen-ils.org).

Barring some post-install issues I still need to iron out, I have
packages for Evergreen, OpenSRF and their dependencies for Arch
Linux[2], Debian[3], and am currently working on fedora packages. I am
looking into using OpenSUSE's build service[4] as a way of building
for multiple distributions/architectures and hosting repositories.

Part of the packaging process involves patching the sources so they
will bnuild correctly under packaging conditions. A lot of these
changes don't alter the normal build process, so have made their way
into the current Evergreen/OpenSRF trunk. Hopefully this will simplify
packaging of future releases.

The issue with the build process that I'm currently trying to tackle
is that of rpath. Distributions, fedora especially[5], frown upon the
usage of rpath hardcoded library paths (to the point of build tools
refusing to build packages). However, by default Evergreen and OpenSRF
use these rather heavily for their own libraries. Is this a concious
decision that has been made, or just something autotools defaults to?
Whereabouts in the build process does this get decided? Currently for
fedora I am manually replacing rpath with ld.so.conf.d after build,
but it would be nicer to do it 'right' during the build process.

This coming week, I hope to finish off my work on package creation,
and look into the potential uses of the packages, starting with
creating a livecd, using the Debian Live[6] framework.

Regards,
Ben

[1] https://gitorious.org/evergreen-bjwebb/evergreen-packaging
[2] http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?SeB=m&K=bjwebb
[3] http://xn--gce.com/evergreen/
[4] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=home%3Abjwebb%3Aevergreen
[5] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Beware_of_Rpath
[6] http://live.debian.net/