Hi Eric, Thanks for expressing your concerns here. I personally don't feel that the committers and the PMC as a group have a bias towards one way or the other about packaging. Individuals have preferences based on how they ZooKeeper, but I don't have the sense that we have a bias. However, we don't seem to have the necessary expertise or interest to maintain the packaging ourselves. I've come across jiras around it and I'm often wondering whether we should check it in or not because I simply don't have the right level of expertise to decide it. And in fact, that's one reason why I felt that moving to Bigtop was a good idea because we are delegating to a community that understands it better, not to say that we are not duplicating work any longer.
If you get enough support here to bring back the rpm packaging and enough folks expressing interest in maintaining it, then I don't see why not bringing it back. My sense is that there isn't interest and support. -Flavio > On 13 Mar 2016, at 17:53, Eric Yang <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi all, > > In the recent discussions on ZOOKEEPER-1604, there are a lot of good points > from both sides who like to keep or remove packaging code from ZooKeeper. > Some of the packaging problems were defects in rpmbuild. There are people > who is interested in ZooKeeper and doesn't like to tackle the ball and > chain of Bigtop. When I started ZOOKEEPER-999, some of the build tools > were lacking at that time. Therefore, it was using a side effect path to > build binaries once and share between RPM and Debian packages. The build > system doesn't work correctly on RHEL 6 after rpm fixed the side effect > path. In ZOOKEEPER-1210, the patch did a short circuit of BUILD_ROOT_DIR > point to top level of build output directory rather than building > directory. This could erase developer's machine, if the build was running > as root. This was quickly realized and a patch has been put forward in > ZOOKEEPER-2007 to fix the short circuit mistake. Unfortunately, > ZOOKEEPER-2007 is never committed. Over the course of many years, > packaging code has been removed in ZOOKEEPER-1604. Everyone has been > forwarded to use Bigtop project. While this works for some people, but it > doesn't work for others. Packaging tools have been improved quite a bit > with Maven, where rpm package building is as easy as describing files in a > .xml file without reverse engineer the tools to do thing backwards. I like > to see ZooKeeper moving to maven, and improve the ability to build rpm > packaging with proper tooling. This will improve the adoption rate. > However, progress would not be made unless the community agrees to review > build patches more carefully. This will only happen if someone is willing > to invest the time to review the project build system, and PMC and > committers are willing to move forward with the proposal. If others put > out patches to move in this direction, please be thoughtful and discuss > with the contributor. After all, the contributor may have spent months to > work on this problem with his personal time. If this is not the direction > that favored by the community, then I also accept the current state of > affair. This message is intended for everyone involved to come to an > consensus whether to accept build related patches. Thank you > > regards, > Eric
