Package distribution hassles - a proposal.

[Max TenEyck Woodbury]

Let's try this again:

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John H Terpstra wrote:
> 
> Max,
> 
> ...
> 
> There are about 185 known Linux "distributions" - but Linux is only a part
> of our installed base!

I just spent an hour searching the Red Hat FTP site for samba*.rpms.
There were over a 100. 21 different .src.rpms for samba and 4 for smbfs.
Obviously, it makes no sense to build for anything older than 6.2, but
should I document the older stuff? I'm inclined to limit the initial effort
to stuff that's less than 2 years old. If someone else wanted to do the
'historic' stuff for the fun of it, the more power to 'em!

I'll do a web search for other samba distributions later tonight, but
it would help if you supplied a list to make sure I don't miss anything
obvious.

Simo Sorce wrote:
> 
> What about building a script that will build the packages on it's own
> every time a new release is made? We can also think to let it run once a
> day tomake daily snapshots! Maybe it can be made part of the build farm
> so that the packaging gets tested too.

>From what little experience I've had, it doesn't work that way.

You need a base-line system to do the build on. Sometimes the
patch level makes a difference. I know of three ways to
have that:

1) Separate machines for each base-line. (Basically what's happening
   now and not really practical.)

2) Different base systems in different partitions. (Not too bad if
   some of the partitions, like /home, are common to all systems.
   Requires a BIG disk and a lot of reboots.)

3) Use dismountable boot partitions. (1 GB Zip drives? I've got my
   main disk in a swap tray. Anybody got a bunch of 1-2 GB drives
   I could have cheap? It's a bit more work than the multiple
   partition method since you have to swap disks between boots.)

But it can't just be done with a simple script. Might work with a
very heterogeneous cluster...

mtew
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