I wouldn't say problems that have plagued Fedora. These are more of possible improvements and we'd like to see whether Conary groups (etc.) bring these benefits; this is an experiment not a promise. It's worked for RHEL and CentOS for the past few years so why not Fedora? But I disagree with coming in and telling people who have built a successful and widely adopted distro that they are plagued with problems. And that's not just because I helped start Fedora... They have a lot of success under their belt, collectively speaking. The question is whether we can help even more.
I want to be clear that I, personally, simply cannot commit to implementing any of these rpmbuild integration pieces. Right now, it's just an interesting (as I see it) idea, if someone wants to try building something. On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 05:54:52PM +0100, Martin Bähr wrote: > hi, > > the following is what i think is good enough to submit as a talk proposal. > if you have any suggestions please don't hesitate to comment. > the submission deadline is 24 hours from the time of this email. > > session name: > "repackaging fedora with conary" (anyone have a better title?) > > abstract: > In this talk we will share the current work of the foresight linux project to > rebase the foresight distribution on top of fedora. > > Foresight is a distribution with rolling releases using the conary packaging > toolchain. > In fl:1 and fl:2 we built the distribution on top of rpath, who also > developed conary. > For fl:3, the next major incarnation of foresight we are rebasing on top of > fedora. > > To do this, we are importing all of f20 into a conary repository and we are > then building our own distribution on top of this collection. > > This enables us to effectively use fedora with our own packaging toolchain. > > Then, having done this, we have the opportunity to explore whether in doing so > we have solved problems that have plagued Fedora. For example, while many > people upgrade Fedora regularly without problems, there are also many horror > stories of fedup breaking people's systems. Many of the kinds of breakage > that > show up are things that Conary could address. Among those are more complete > deps and dep-complete update jobs often avoiding the "broken screensaver" > problem, and groups allowing a more precise migration that avoids leaving > straggling bits that create untested situations that break. We have not been > the one experiencing these problems, so we can't say for sure. We just know > that we've been able to maintain a rolling distro across major updates for > years (though we quit updating gnome when gnome3 showed up...) and so it's > worth trying. It might be that if people trusted Fedora updates more, they > would update more, which would be good for Fedora. It's a distraction when > people complain about the short maintenance lifetime. Can we make that > better? > > Then Foresight becomes a rolling remix, not only useful on its own, but an > opportunity and context in which to demonstrate whether or not Conary can make > the Fedora base bits roll forward with fewer update failures. > > We've already found packaging bugs in the release just from trying to import > into Conary. We expect to find more. That has typically happened during > Conary imports of RPM distributions. If we import the beta releases of > Fedora, > we can find bugs before they hit users, and the kinds of bugs Conary finds are > usually the ones that are easy to fix, "low hanging fruit" that can really > contribute to fit and finish. > > There was some interest last year in whether the conary build process could > make it easier to build RPMs, but there was really not enough interest to get > enough people involved to make it happen. If interest rises this topic could > be > revisited. > > (i rewrote the first part and then copied the rest with slight modifications. > thanks mkj for pretty much writing this for me!) > > outline: > The talk will cover the following points: > > * Short introduction to foresight and conary > * What are we doing with fedora? > * Why is this interesting for the fedora community? > > * Enabling Fedora users to consume Fedora using a rolling model. > > * Demonstrating a new way to build a Fedora remix, one that takes > advantage of the rolling model and helps the remixes stay current. > > * Contributing to upstream quality by catching certain classes of > bugs prior to release. > > * Using Conary's extensive package build automation to make it easier > to build better packages for Fedora. > > > greetings, martin. > > -- > eKita - the online platform for your entire academic life > hackerspace beijing - http://qike.info > -- > chief engineer eKita.co > pike programmer pike.lysator.liu.se caudium.net societyserver.org > BLUG secretary beijinglug.org > foresight developer foresightlinux.org realss.com > unix sysadmin > Martin Bähr working in china http://societyserver.org/mbaehr/ > > _______________________________________________ > Foresight-devel mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.foresightlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/foresight-devel _______________________________________________ Foresight-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.foresightlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/foresight-devel
