On 04/16/2016 02:29 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
I may be in a university environment, but we do not waste time
reinventing the wheel for research or research support activities --
and neither does any other viable research group.
No insult was intended, incidentally, but you are still in a different
environment than most of us, myself included. In my environment I run
the IT department (and we run an open IT using as much open source as
possible, with as much user feedback listened to as is practical). I am
cognizant that my situation is probably also a bit unique in that I have
flexibility (and authority in my environment as CIO) that many people on
this list do not have.
However, it was my understanding that the EPEL or other similar
automata are not readily available -- for deploying production code
through porting there is no reason not to use an existing "automaton"
that can resolve dependencies (I recall a correspondent referring to
these sorts of things as :dependency hell") from whatever source code
repositories as required and ultimately build a working executable
application.
The full EPEL build system is open source; it's called koji and is what
the Fedora Project uses to build packages. You can replicate the full
Fedora build infrastructure yourself on your own server farm if you
wished (and had time/resources) to do so. See the following links:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/KojiBuildSystem
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Koji
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Koji/ServerHowTo
Your understanding of the availability of the EPEL buildsystem was
correct only in part; EPEL is built against RHEL packages that are not
publicly available, but there is nothing preventing you from using the
koji software to build/rebuild EPEL (Fedora) source packages using
ScientificLinux packages to populate the buildroot. And, in my opinion,
EPEL needs to continue to be built using RHEL packages to populate the
buildroot, as that seems to be the most compatible with the from-source
rebuilds like SL and CentOS. But your own, private, Fedora Extra
Packages for SL is not impossible to do, and all software and processes
are openly available.
...But -- I would very much like a working SL7 binary executable of a
reasonably current Abiword.
There are channels to request EPEL packages (especially if the package
is already in Fedora), and that mechanism has been documented in this
thread; thanks, Pat! I chimed in on this thread because I also have
application for abiword on 7; my particular need has not yet been pressing.
Had the need been pressing I would have built my own abiword packages
(following the process Russ did and recursively building the
dependencies) and gone about my merry way without commenting on the
list..... and, in fact, I have done that with other packages in the past
that I have needed; I have a number of packages that I have built myself
because no repo had the particular version I needed (a slightly older
kicad, for instance....).
But I am not in the business of being a repo, either; there are definite
ramifications for binary distribution, and I have no desire to be
'responsible' again for a widely distributed binary package, outside of
an established repository, and I would have to have a pressing need to
do that. As an explanation for that, I would just point you to the
following archived mailing list messages:
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/[email protected] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/[email protected]
Since it appears EPEL7 will have abiword reasonably soon, I'm not going
to duplicate the effort for my own non-pressing need, but I will thank
Russ for poking the process along.
