[packman] Volunteer reporting for duty

[Pascal Bleser]

On 2011-03-28 12:49:37 (+0100), Remco de Vreugd <rdevreugd at novell.com> wrote:
> Hi there,

Hi Remco
(sorry for the late reply)

[...]
> I do not really know what it takes to become (and remain) a
> Packman maintainer. I am willing to invest some time, and

We only want people to have a certain degree of experience with
packaging RPMs, as Packman is used by many, many people and
breakage is bad ;)
(That being said, we know our quality of service isn't always
that great, but we're doing the best we can with the very small
amount of contributors we have.)

> seeing that the tools in question are not that likely to get
> updated further I would not expect there to be a need for
> frequent updates in content. Building a package once, for

True, but OTOH when there is no active upstream development,
they are likely to never get fixed or improved either (e.g.
buffer overflows, compile fixes, changed APIs, ...).
So... yes, but ... :)

> various distributions (openSUSE current, -1, -2 and -3, plus
> perhaps SLES current, -1, -2), and running a rebuild whenever
> a new generation of a distribution gets introduced, would
> certainly be an option for me.

We use our own instance of the openSUSE Build Service, and
hence, packaging for Packman means that the builds are made on
our server grid. You can (and *should*) of course always make a
local build for one distribution on your host first, but apart
from that, just submit it to our server and it takes care of all
the rest.

That also means that which distributions the packages are built
for is something that is configured globally for the Packman
repository (and team).
As such, we do *not* build packages for SLES except the
Essentials repository, and that only for the latest SLES
version.
The reason is that older SLES versions are almost always a
packaging nightmare due to very, very old versions of many
libraries, and also because we probably don't have enough
hardware to cope with more distributions to build for.

Also, if your packages don't require some of the libraries and
frameworks that are only provided on Packman for the reasons we
all know about, building on build.opensuse.org is another option
you should consider, especially as you can also build for
SLE9 and SLE10 there.

That being said, we very much welcome contributors, as we are
extremely understaffed ;)

BTW, we can also discuss it on IRC, might be more practical.
We have our channel #packman on freenode, I'm yaloki there.

cheers
-- 
  -o) Pascal Bleser
  /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green
 _\_v http://fosdem.org   -- we haz conf
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