third revision: > submission deadline in less than 6 hours :-)
> 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 and groups allowing a more precise migration that avoids leaving > straggling bits that create untested situations that break. We have not been > the ones 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
