[CentOS-devel] RFC: Alternative Desktop SIG

Thu Jul 10 14:54:36 UTC 2014
Anders F Björklund <afb at users.sourceforge.net>

Kevin Fenzi wrote:

>>> dumped? I've not really seen many if any bugs on epel5 xfce
>>> packages... 
>> 
>> Well, last time I looked it was still trying to use the "Fedora" icons
>> from the epel6 package so it seemed like it was built and left there ?
> 
> I maintain/use Xfce in Fedora. Another interested party worked on Xfce
> for epel5/6. I'd be happy to look at specific bugs, but I don't use it
> day to day there, so I wouldn't have noticed this. 

This would be an articulated goal of the new Special Interest Group,
to make sure that such bugs and wishlists are forwarded upstream...

>>>> The 4.6 Xfce in EPEL 5 was less polished than 4.4 in CentOS 5
>>>> Extras. For instance, the whole group (Xfce) is missing from the
>>>> EPEL comps ?
>>> 
>>> Odd. I thought i had updated that. 
>> 
>> Maybe I'm doing it wrong... I thought it was a "feature", like the
>> "@buildsys-build" group being missing (replaced that with packages).
> 
> Nope. it should be there... I can add it, although not sure how many
> people care about epel5 at this point. ;) 
> epel6 does have the groups... 

I think we are currently seeing a 50-50 split, where EL6 just passed.
So I think that EL5 will probably be here 3 more years. "Red Hat XP" :-)

>>>> With EPEL 7 still in beta, and no (or not many) Xfce packages being
>>>> built so far - I decided to see how far off it was, by using
>>>> Fedora. Not very, it turned out... It already runs (!), with some
>>>> minor things like ConsoleKit/systemd and udisks/udisks2, with
>>>> the .fc18 packages.
>>> 
>>> nonamedotc at fedoraproject.org has been heading this effort on the
>>> epel7 side. He's been building things in copr first and testing
>>> them before building in epel. We have the base/core packages aready
>>> branched. 
>> 
>> Nice! Will make contact with him/her then, and file some new Xfce
>> bugs. There's some really obscure ones, like the "tab" key not
>> working (!).
> 
> Fun. ;) Thanks!

Contact established, will test the new packages once they arrive.
I added the packagelists from fc18, as "centos-el7-xfce-fc18.txt"

>>>> The first step would be to rebuild "@xfce-desktop" properly
>>>> for .el7,
>>> 
>>> Please coordinate with nonamedotc? Or do you intend to just copy
>>> this into a seperate repo?
>> 
>> I don't think there's any need at this point, it should work right
>> off EPEL. Basically the user can do: yum --enablerepo=epel
>> groupinstall xfce-desktop
> 
> Great. Thats my idea as well. 

Possibly we will do the whole "xfce-desktop-environment" group later.
Not sure if the "xfce-media" is applicable at all, but we will see...

>> Not sure what the deal is here if you *only* want to include the
>> Desktops SIG, but not the rest of EPEL ? Sounds like it would involve
>> rebuilding/resigning.
>> 
>> And I have no idea why it is called "epel7" and not "el7" now, if
>> that signals some further isolation ? I will be running EL, with EPEL
>> disabled by default.
> 
> It's to avoid confusion. Some people in the past saw that epel5/6 had
> 'el5' and 'el6' branches and started saying things like "thats in
> rhel5, see the el5 branch!". We made the epel7 branch 'epel7' to make it
> clear that the packages we not RHEL, but epel. 

Well, there's confusion between the git branch name and the rpm dist macro ?
And the tags in git.centos.org are called "c7", so there's lots of standards.

--anders