[OPEN-ILS-DEV] SITKA sysadmin Hello & Gentoo Packaging (Was GSOC hello)

[Robin H. Johnson]

Hi,

Seeing Ben's post to the list, I figured now was probably a suitable
time to introduce myself, due to the mention of Gentoo.

I'm Robin Johnson (robbat2 on freenode and most of the internet). I
joined SITKA (the BC consortium) as the system administrator at the
start of March. I've been a Gentoo developer since 2003, packaging a lot
of things (amongst other open-source development in the last decade).

I first saw Evergreen back in 2006, during an local unconference.
With relation to the Gentoo things, after seeing EG in 2006, I started
putting the dependencies straight into Gentoo [1]. Primarily all of the
libraries, python and perl modules, stopping after OpenSRF.

I didn't get very far beyond that at the time, as I found that the
Erlang VM on my PowerPC systems was very unstable, and EG was unusable
with working Jabber.

In terms of system maintenance, Ben's GSoC project looks really
promising to help improve maintainability of EG deployments.

For SITKA's recent EG2 migration (from EG1.6) and new hardware, I looked
very hard at finding as much from the distribution repositories (Ubuntu
for SITKA to date) as possible, well beyond the existing
Makefile.install. The only step I didn't take was updating any .deb
packages to get newer versions where the Ubuntu set was too old, and
that was mainly due to lack of time during the migration (and more
critical issues).

> My name is Ben Webb (I'm bjwebb on freenode) and I'll be working on
> Evergreen over the summer as part of Google's Summer of Code. My
> project involves working to package the Evergreen codebase in various
> ways - my plan can be seen on google's site[0], but willl be updated
> shortly since some Debian packaging work is already happening.
The largest stumbling block for distribution packaging and uptake is
following distribution packaging guidelines, esp. FHS install locations.
One of the other Gentoo developers gave a good talk at FOSDEM last year
about packaging for upstreams: "How to be a good upstream", the video is
on the web, I just can't find the slides at present, I'll link them when
I find out where they are.

Fixing build scripts: Eg ensuring makefiles respect DESTDIR, work in
parallel, only install during the install phase, don't change system
config files (would be blocked by the sandbox)
[2] has the changes I made to OpenSRF-1.0.7 for packaging in compliance
with Gentoo guidelines. I'll port it to 1.2.0 and submit it against the
git repositories shortly.

[1] http://packages.gentoo.org/package/dev-libs/OpenSRF
[2] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/dev-libs/OpenSRF/files/OpenSRF-1.0.7-buildfix.patch?revision=1.1&view=markup

> I've noticed that Gentoo's dependency list have been removed from this file. I'd
> be interested if anyone knows the reason for doing so?
I don't know why/when it was removed, but I'd love to get it restored,
and covering absolutely all of the packages.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
SITKA: Sysadmin
-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Developer, Trustee & Infrastructure Lead
E-Mail     : robbat2 at gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED  F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85