I've been talking with some of the SuSE guys and we agree there's some overlap or at least coordination between their buildsystem and ours. The first obvious low hanging fruit is common macros. For those who wonder "why would we help OpenSuSE?" the answer is common goals, and better user experiences.
The problem is time and coordination. So on a whim I thought I'd send this email out. Do we have any contributors out there who are both members of Fedora and SuSE who would be willing to lead this charge, find similarities and places for coordination?
-Mike
On Tue, 16 Dec 2008, Mike McGrath wrote:
I've been talking with some of the SuSE guys and we agree there's some overlap or at least coordination between their buildsystem and ours. The first obvious low hanging fruit is common macros. For those who wonder "why would we help OpenSuSE?" the answer is common goals, and better user experiences.
You sure about there being much overlap and thus a certain incentive to develop common macros?
The last time I was paid to look at SuSE was around 2003 or so and back then there was not much common except the .spec suffix. BuildRequires weren't used at all (admittedly, Red Hat was rather frugal wrt BRs) and I haven't seen much use of %macros at all.
AFAICS BuildRequirements were implemented by parsing #-commented lines and adding the named packages to the dependency list.
Has this behaviour changed?
On the other hand: Is the buildsystem the right place to work on common goals? I'd assume that specifically for macros, rpm.org is a better place.
regards, andreas
On Tue, 16 Dec 2008, Andreas Thienemann wrote:
On Tue, 16 Dec 2008, Mike McGrath wrote:
I've been talking with some of the SuSE guys and we agree there's some overlap or at least coordination between their buildsystem and ours. The first obvious low hanging fruit is common macros. For those who wonder "why would we help OpenSuSE?" the answer is common goals, and better user experiences.
You sure about there being much overlap and thus a certain incentive to develop common macros?
The last time I was paid to look at SuSE was around 2003 or so and back then there was not much common except the .spec suffix. BuildRequires weren't used at all (admittedly, Red Hat was rather frugal wrt BRs) and I haven't seen much use of %macros at all.
AFAICS BuildRequirements were implemented by parsing #-commented lines and adding the named packages to the dependency list.
Has this behaviour changed?
Don't know, we'll need someone committed to look at issues like this.
On the other hand: Is the buildsystem the right place to work on common goals? I'd assume that specifically for macros, rpm.org is a better place.
Possibly but we don't have any control over rpm.org, we do, however, have control over our buildsystems.
-Mike
On Tuesday 16 December 2008 10:48:48 am Mike McGrath wrote:
I've been talking with some of the SuSE guys and we agree there's some overlap or at least coordination between their buildsystem and ours. The first obvious low hanging fruit is common macros. For those who wonder "why would we help OpenSuSE?" the answer is common goals, and better user experiences.
The problem is time and coordination. So on a whim I thought I'd send this email out. Do we have any contributors out there who are both members of Fedora and SuSE who would be willing to lead this charge, find similarities and places for coordination?
I think that common macros needs to be solved at rpm.org level. not a buildsystem level. koji has no say in any of the macros it uses what is defined inside the distro. the macros fedora uses are defined in rpm and redhat- rpm-config, the disttag macro is defined in fedora-release.
I see great benefit to everyone by having that problem solved at the rpm.org level. it will make it much easier to pickup packages and fixes cross distro. that is not a bad thing. especially for ISV's and upstreams supporting all distros they only need to do the work once and build everywhere.
Working directly with them to fix issues for there buildsystem however I feel causes some conflicts. namely it legitimises the use of there buildsystem for building fedora/RHEL packages. I know people use it and will continue to do so. but I would ask why? is there some service that fedora could provide and is not? is it because you can be lazy and sloppy in the packaging and it lets you? is it just being able to do it in a single place?
We do need to get out of the business of running two buildsystems. we really do need to be able to build EPEL in koji. I have scheduled a koji hackfest for fudcon. so if your there and interested then come help. there is always #koji on freenode for discussion on koji, so if you cant make it in person you can be there virtually :)
Dennis
On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 11:45:19AM -0600, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
We do need to get out of the business of running two buildsystems. we really do need to be able to build EPEL in koji. I have scheduled a koji hackfest for fudcon. so if your there and interested then come help. there is always #koji on freenode for discussion on koji, so if you cant make it in person you can be there virtually :)
Is there somewhere I can get an overview of the challenge and process of moving EPEL to koji? If not, can we take some time and write up such a thing?
- Karsten
On Thu, 18 Dec 2008, Karsten Wade wrote:
On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 11:45:19AM -0600, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
We do need to get out of the business of running two buildsystems. we really do need to be able to build EPEL in koji. I have scheduled a koji hackfest for fudcon. so if your there and interested then come help. there is always #koji on freenode for discussion on koji, so if you cant make it in person you can be there virtually :)
Is there somewhere I can get an overview of the challenge and process of moving EPEL to koji? If not, can we take some time and write up such a thing?
https://fedorahosted.org/koji/ticket/49
-Mike
On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 10:48:48AM -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:
I've been talking with some of the SuSE guys and we agree there's some overlap or at least coordination between their buildsystem and ours. The first obvious low hanging fruit is common macros. For those who wonder "why would we help OpenSuSE?" the answer is common goals, and better user experiences.
The problem is time and coordination. So on a whim I thought I'd send this email out. Do we have any contributors out there who are both members of Fedora and SuSE who would be willing to lead this charge, find similarities and places for coordination?
The best places for Fedora and openSUSE to collaborate are in the upstream communities where we can have the best effect on the free software community. That means rpm.org, smolts.org, GNOME, freedesktop.org, KDE, and so on. There's fertile ground there for plenty of technical development, and I feel that's the place where Fedora should be putting resources.
On Tue December 16 2008, Mike McGrath wrote:
The problem is time and coordination. So on a whim I thought I'd send this email out. Do we have any contributors out there who are both members of Fedora and SuSE who would be willing to lead this charge, find similarities and places for coordination?
There exists already a project to coordinate between even more distributions: http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/
There was also already a first reachout to unify packaging guidelines: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/distributions/2008-March/000100.html
But there is not much activity.
Regards, Till
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