[AG-DEV] AG release organization, packaging, and pkgsrc

[Douglas Kosovic]

Hi Brook,

> If the AG community perceives these as valuable benefits, I would be
> glad to work with you to guide the process of developing expertise in
> the use of pkgsrc for distributing AG software.  As it stands, based
> on our work most of the necessary code is already within pkgsrc or
> pkgsrc-wip; we are actually using it to manage deployment of our own
> operational AG nodes.  What is required for moving forward is simply
> an acceptance of the idea that pkgsrc could be a viable distribution
> mechanism, more testing on a wider array of platforms, and improving
> our pkgsrc code to cover cases we have not yet encountered.  None of
> this is nearly as complex as the AG code itself.  Overall, I think
> this would go a long way toward improving the standardization of
> operational AG nodes.

Which platforms do have pkgsrc/pkgsrc-wip working with AGTk?

With AGTk3 on Fedora Linux, I currently have a total of 6 yum RPM 
repositories for i386 and x86-64 Fedora Core 3, 4 & 5. Which can be seen 
here:
   http://www.vislab.uq.edu.au/accessgrid3/fedora/
I can't provide the same binary RPMs across all Fedora versions due to 
differences in python versions, GCC ABI, OpenSSL, Xorg, bundled system 
packages and i386 vs x86-64. I can't even supply the same source RPMs in 
some cases due to differences (e.g. I build against Apple's mDNSResponder on 
FC3, but use Avahi on FC4 & 5).

Like 'apt-get' that Derek mentioned to automatically install the 
dependencies, on Fedora (be the dependencies from Fedora Core, Fedora Extras 
or my repository), all that is required is to issue :
  yum install AccessGrid

and to install a AGTk-2.4 version which can be co-installed, they just need 
to issue:
  yum install compat-AccessGrid-2.4
( I had to modularize the old monolithic AccessGrid 2.4 into multiple RPMs 
so it could be co-installed with AGTk 3.0, the main AGTk 2.4 RPM is now 
called compat-AccessGrid-2.4)

Everthing is supplied as SRPM which can be rebuilt into a binary (or noarch 
in some cases) RPM by issuing something like:
  rpmbuild --rebuild packagename-1.0.src.rpm


Cheers,
Doug