Package distribution hassles - a proposal.

[John H Terpstra]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2002, Max TenEyck Woodbury wrote:

> John H Terpstra wrote:

> 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.

We need support for:

Red Hat:             6.1, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2                **********

Conectiva Linux: last 2 or 3 releases                       *

Mandrake:            7.x, 8.0, 8.1                          ******

TurboLinux:          4.0, 6.0, 6.5, 7.0                     ****

Caldera OpenLinux:
	Workstation: 2.3, 2.4, 3.1, 3.1.1                   *
	Server:      2.3, 3.1, 3.1.1                        *****

Caldera Open UNIX:   8.0                                    **
Caldera OpenServer (SCO OpenServer) 5.0.5, 5.0.6            ****

SuSE:                6.x, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3                     ***


e-Smith:            Current and immediate previous only     *

Sun Solaris:
	Sparc:      6, 7, 8, 9                              ****
	Intel:      7, 8                                    ***

HPUX:               10.20, 11.00, current                   ****

Tru64:              4.0B, 4.0D, 5.0, 5.1                    ***

AIX:                current and two prior                   **

Stars show approx request ratio. And the leader is: Red HAT - No Surprise!

>
> 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:

Unfortunately, to build the above we need separate virgin installed
systems - ie: No patches or updates. In the case of Linux OS's - update
packages that involve the kernel, the compiler, or the glibc libraries
taint the RPMS so they become dependant on the updated system.

>
> 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...

It would be good to explore this. I have machines here that could become
part of the build farm and that could be used to auto-build packages.

Cheers,
John T.

-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org

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