[CentOS-devel] centpkg as rpm ?

[Johnny Hughes]

On 07/05/2014 11:37 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 5, 2014 at 11:41 AM, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote:
>> On 07/05/2014 10:23 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>>> On Sat, Jul 5, 2014 at 10:45 AM, Brian Stinson <bstinson at ksu.edu> wrote:
>>>> A specfile is coming up next! I'll post here when I have something built.
>>>>
>>>> Brian
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Brian Stinson
>>>> bstinson at ksu.edu | IRC: bstinson | Bitbucket/Twitter: bstinsonmhk
>>> I see that centpkg is dependent on pyrpkg from EPEL, and expects one
>>> to do 'yum install pyrpkg'. That requires manual activation of the
>>> EPEL repository: Is the EPEL 3rd party repository stable enough for
>>> RHEL and CentOS 7 yet? This could be GPL copied over straight from
>>> Scientific Linux, from at
>>> http://ftp2.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6/SRPMS/SL/yum-conf-epel-6-1.1.src.rpm.
>>> Or perhaps our CentOS developers have some internal tool they use to
>>> configure this?
>>>
>>> I hope that CentOS can have EPEL as a supported optional yum
>>> configuration,  if EPEL is going to be critical for using tools like
>>> centpkg.
>> The information that pyrpkg is needed for using centpkg.py is in the
>> readme on the git.centos.org site in the centpkg repo.
> Yes, listed as "root# <Install and configure EPEL-Release>". For one
> thing, the package is actually named 'epel-release'.
>
> May I recommend instead:
>
>              "root# <Download and configure relevant epel-release RPM>"
>
> I'd submit it at bugs.centos.org, but there isn't a category there yet
> for 'centpkg' or for 'centos-git-common'
>
>> EPEL release will indeed be part of c7-extras .. and also c5 and c6,
>> after the EPEL 7 repo comes out of beta.
> Great! Nice to hear! The sooner the beta!
>
>> Until then, if someone is not smart enough to figure out how to make
>> centpkg to work with git.centos.org because they can't find a python
>> dep, then they likely should not be trying to build packages from git in
>> the first place.
> Oh, boy. That way lies madness, because "finding a python dependency"
> is like "finding a perl dependency". Let's be nice to the newbies. Not
> all of them have had the opportunity to explore mock and EPEL as
> thoroughly as us, and the newly published build system has a steep
> enough learning curve.
>
>> It should also be noted that the other published python tool in
>> centos-common-git needs the package 'python-requests' which is in the
>> EPEL repo.  That is also in the readme for centos-common-git on the site
>> as well.
> Right. *I* can walk through such dependencies like a walk in the park.
> The developers or newer sys-admins whom I have to train? Not so much.
> I'm anticipating considerable difficulty getting them to surrender
> doing "rpmbuild --rebuild filename.src.rpm

You are correct, of course.  For the long term, we want to make the
tools better and easier to use.

But for right now, we are working on the CentOS-7 release and the
packages on git.centos.org are only the CentOS-7 packages.  And WE are
building those packages for those 'developers or newer sys-admins' you
mention who do not know how to do that.

While people can, and if they want to learn then we encourage them to,
build the CentOS 7 packages from the information we are providing .. the
goal of the site is to provide the source code for what we release (it
does that) and to provide tools to help CentOS SIG's members consume and
work with the Source Code (we are working on that).  We will also
provide signed SRPMs for all the package we release as we always have on
vault.centos.org after the release of CentOS-7.

So while people can certainly reproduce CentOS with the things we are
providing (we are using it RIGHT NOW to produce CentOS-7, so it can be
done) ... that is not the purpose of the site or the tools.  We would
RATHER that those people instead volunteer for a SIG and provide added
benefit to community at large by making something that they want to do
on top of CentOS 5, 6, or 7 better.  We also certainly appreciate and
want them to review the build logs, do test builds, find issues with
build roots, make the tools better, etc.

We are standing up community build services so that SIGs can build
against CentOS and release packages that all can use.  We think the
community in general would be much better served by 100 people working
on things that are additive to CentOS for the community via SIGs than
for those same 100 people to all be instead reproducing what we are
already doing. 

I mean, its open source software - so do with it what you want if it
makes you happy ... but we are making this stuff as completely open as
we are so others can feel comfortable about it and collaborate around
it.  That is also the purpose of the site tools.

Even before we started this openness, companies like Twitter, Zynga,
Facebook, GoDaddy (and countless others) used CentOS to build their
businesses on.  Thousands of universities around the world use it
already to do all kinds of stuff.  The human genome project, data from
Mars, Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (and again, countless
others) use it right now.  It is on machines everywhere (2% of the top
500 super computers in the world .. all the way down to my laptop).

So thanks very much for your input into the process, we can use your
help to make CentOS better.


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