[AG-DEV] RAT/VIC in AG packaging

[Douglas Kosovic]

Hi Tom,

> I've been considering placing the RAT/VIC binaries in the bin
> directory on the various platforms so people have them
> more readily available, instead of having to trudge down into
> ~/.AccessGrid/local_services/VideoService or similar.  Not that
> I want to encourage people to run the tools by hand, but they
> are significant parts of the toolkit and people tend to reach for
> them often enough that they should perhaps not be obscured.
> 
> Q:  Does this present any problems for packaging?  (for example,
> on linux, conflict with standalone rat/vic packages)
> 
> Other relevant comments are also welcome.

I'm already using /usr/bin for rat, vic and vncviewer with the
AccessGrid-3.0 beta2 and compat-AccessGrid-2.4 RPMs I provide. In the
corresponding SRPMs, I apply a patch to modify the audio and video
services, so all I'll have to do is drop one patch file.

I currently have the following dependencies on /usr/bin files:

$ rpm -q --requires AccessGrid-3.0 | grep bin
/usr/bin/Xvnc
/usr/bin/rat
/usr/bin/rat-kill
/usr/bin/rat-ui
/usr/bin/vic
/usr/bin/vncviewer

Having them seperated has simplified things for me. I now have the same
noarch AccessGrid RPM for both i386 and x86-64 FCs. I can also supply an
i386 rat RPM with the x86-86 yum repositories. The AccessGrid RPM is now
a quarter of it's previous size and takes less than a minute to build.

In the past I've had issues with users upgrading their Fedora versions,
the ~/.AccessGrid/local_service vic and rat mightn't start because of
library dependency issue on a particular OpenSSL library from a previous
Fedora version. Also for people switching between i386 and x86-64 and
using the same home dir, the 64bit vic and rat didn't work on a 32bit
FC.


I was thinking of making RPMs for the positional vic and rat, which
could be drop in replacements.  

Cheers,
Doug