hi,
i just submitted the following:
Title:
======
Re-rolling Fedora with Conary
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.
Having done this, we now 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 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?
Foresight becomes a rolling remix of Fedora, 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?
Outline:
========
* 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.
Self Promotion:
===============
Martin uses Linux and develops Free Software for more than 20 years. He has
used various distributions from SLS and Slackware, followed by Red Hat (RHL),
Debian and Ubuntu. He joined Foresight in 2007 and now uses it in his own
company to serve his customers. He is also using Fedora on his OLPC XO Laptop.
In this talk he is representing the work of the Foresight Development Team,
which he is a member of.
Conary represents a leap in the evolution of software packaging. It not only
builds on the experience gained from other packaging systems, but it surpasses
them by providing a level of integration and automation of the packaging
process that reduces the work required to maintain packages dramatically.
We would like to share our tools with the Fedora community and explore how we
can help make Fedora a better distribution.
greetings, martin.
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