hi, this is a revised version. changed or added are the lines not starting with "> "
feel free to comment. submission deadline is 14 hours away. > 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 some Fedora users have encountered. For example, while many people upgrade Fedora regularly without problems, there are also > 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. The primary goal of this endeavor is to make it easier to keep foresight uptodate and allow us to focus on the bits that interest us most, which is the user experience that we are able to create as a binary rolling release distribution with risk-free upgrade and downgrade support. For Fedora these are more of possible improvements and we'd like to see whether Conary can bring these benefits; this is an experiment not a promise. Conary is already used to manage RHEL and CentOS in this way in the past few years, and it has worked there, so why not Fedora too? > 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
