>?????BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE????? >Hash: SHA1 > >I maintain a few hundreds of SUSE RPMs on my site, so I think I'm quite qualified to comment on this ;) >
Howdy Pascal You are very well know indeed. As someone who has had exposure in creating an rpm based distro from scratch I can possibly also comment .... ;) >Zlatko Michailov wrote: >> Please create a section on the opensuse.org web site where enthusiasts >> around the world can upload product RPMs for SuSE. > >Upload RPMs ? Anyone ? > me to thanks ;D >While we definately need to improve the 3rd party packaging community for SUSE Linux, care has to be >taken on a few important things: > >1) the quality of the packages: building good RPMs (i.e. writing good spec files) for a distribution >means having much experience with it (both building RPMs _and_ knowing the distribution well), so >I'm not sure it should be "open to everyone". Having lots and lots of packages that don't install >properly, don't have proper integration (init scripts, desktop files, dependencies) and break users' >systems is certainly not an improvement > this requires a semi automated install test at least if not more than that. Packages could also be "signed" off by others similar to how kernel changes are done. That way quality is guaranteed and we can mentor less experienced packagers to create more and better product. >2) you need a lot of space to host those packages: for my repository alone, I have 2.2GB of files >(and that doesn't include x86_64 builds) I have a Dual Opteron server with at least 100 GB available (it has more, but that is what we could use) on a US 100 Mbit collocation. The question really is who is going to maintain the repository? > >3) you need services around it, not just offering http and ftp download of RPMs: managing >dependencies is quite a tedious task when you can't use YaST2, apt, yum or red?carpet. Maintaining >that repository metadata isn't such an easy task (ask Eberhard Moenkeberg from gwdg.de, who's kindly >hosting RPMs from several 3rd party packagers) > yep .. you sure know what you are talking about. Currently the apt repository Eberhard is doing is only well known to "insiders" that is at least my impression from NZ. Granted .... I am not talking about the world here ;) >But if you'd like to contribute packages or some processing power (e.g. build the packages on >x86_64), you can join packman: http://packman.links2linux.org >;) ....I wish we would have something like a webbased/yast integrated software warehouse that allows easy menu driven access to thousands of packages in a way your normal non technical computer user would expect. A build system at the back with signoff's and maintainer web site to know when a new source tar ball has been released and can be integrated into the rpm. I am dreaming here. I know! Maybe not though ...... right? > >> I have used both Red Hat 8 and SuSE 9. SuSE is way more user?friendly than >> Red Hat. However, when it comes to installing products that are not included >> in the original distribution, or even updating an existing product, Red Hat >> becomes the king of the hill. My observation is that if a project > >I'd say Debian becomes the king of the hill, and by a large amount. > I think we will be there, but we should make sure things are not broken or unmaintained as quite a few debian packages, even in stable. At least that is what I have been told. >> distributes any binaries, RPMS for Red Hat/Fedora are always included, while >> RPMs for SuSE are not very popular. > >Indeed. There are mostly packman, my site, the suse?people repository, James Ogley's >usr?local?bin.org and a few packages from various packagers (see ftp.gwdg.de, the suser?* stuff). > >> What I'm suggesting is that the opensuse.org web site becomes the ultimate >> location for third?party product RPMs for SuSE. It only takes some disk >> space and a couple of wiki pages. > >See my comments above. It requires a much broader infrastructure. > >Nevertheless, the initiative is important, we really have to get many, many more packagers to build >good RPMs on SUSE. So guys like us need to "mentor" others to become packagers and help them along their way by QA'ing their output and signing off on it. What do you think? That way the huge wishlist that is starting to grow on opensuse.org will be worked on. And once we have build servers we should already have some sort of maintainer system associated with it ...... What does packman use in the backend for maintainers? Is there any webbased collaboration maintenance system/ package DB? Is there a signoff hierarchy? How are tests done? Pascal could you enlighten me ... would be interesting to know. Andreas openSUSE is SUPER: To help in the SUSE Performance Enhanced Release project visit http://www.opensuse.org/index.php/SUPER --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
