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

[Dan Scott]

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 07:11:01PM +0000, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> 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).

Hi Robin, great to hear from you!

> 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.

s/with/without/ - and absolutely, no XMPP = no OpenSRF or Evergreen :)
 
> In terms of system maintenance, Ben's GSoC project looks really
> promising to help improve maintainability of EG deployments.

Yes, I think Ben's project should help Evergreen's
up-and-running-and-maintainability immensely. Fingers crossed.

> 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).

Please share your findings for anything beyond Makefile.install, I'm
sure other sites would appreciate having a better out-of-the-box install
situation.
 
> > 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.

Great, looking forward to it.
 
> 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)

Any patches in these areas would be more than welcome.

> [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.

FWIW, we're up to OpenSRF 2.0.0 now - I suspect that's what you meant
but worth saving you some time anyway.

> [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.

I removed it not all that long ago, because to my knowledge there were
no sites running OpenSRF or Gentoo on production, and there was nobody
talking about using Gentoo for development purposes on the mailing lists
or on IRC, and to the best of my knowledge a Gentoo install had last
been carried out years ago. So rather than suggest that we had any
capability or interest within the community to support OpenSRF or
Evergreen on Gentoo, I decided to rip it out rather than point to
horribly outdated dependencies. 

If you're willing to step up and offer some level of community support
for OpenSRF and Evergreen on Gentoo, then that could obviously change.
Ideally we would also have a build serf machine that we could add to the
buildbot continuous integration server so that we cover Gentoo as a
build/test platform, in addition to the Ubuntu and Debian machines that
are already there. We haven't defined what "community support" means,
yet, but there probably should be some mix of one or more active
technical folks for a given platform and a build server for smoke
testing...

(BTW, I'm no Gentoo-hater; I ran Gentoo for years as my primary desktop
and laptop environment, and developed Evergreen on Gentoo for my first
year or so.)