[packman] Packman and Contrib cooperation

[Pascal Bleser]

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(let's please keep Pavol in CC: :))

> On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 8:17 PM, Marc Schiffbauer
> <marc at schiffbauer.net> wrote:
>> * Pavol Rusnak schrieb am 18.12.08 um 18:02 Uhr:
>>> Hi Packman folks!
>> Hi Pavol,
>>
>> packman is *not* the place for offloading socalled "problematic"
>> packages.
>>
>> I am not a packager, I only host the entire site, but to me this
>> does not sound like a good idea.
>>
>> Why do you not come to packman and put your packages into our
>> repository?
>>
>> I think not to be too tied to Novell is not really a disadvantage
>> ;-)
>>
>>Marek Stopka (M4r3k) wrote:
>
> It is quite simple, why Novell Build Service is better place for our packages.
> 
> 1. We still don't have Build Service as our build server, so we don't
> have such a nice feature like reverse dependency tree is (I mean when
> libfoo is changed all packages requiring libfoo are not rebuilded
> automaticaly)

Not interesting for us. Really. Without a big farm of servers to build
and without putting all the burden on our users and mirrors, it doesn't
make any sense. OBS is great, but only with lots of build power to
process all those automatic dependency build triggers.

The only real advantage I see with the OBS right now, would be to be
able to have different repositories and layer them.

I think that the single most useful move we could (should?) do is to
have a second repository where we have a minimal list of "codec"
packages and where we don't upgrade/conflict with any of the distro
packages.

But coming up with such a list would already be a lot of work.
And our build server isn't really prepared to build with different
repositories. Part of that is implemented, but not tested.

> 2. Currently it is mostly everyone on his own cooperation between
> packagers is not very big and I think a lot of users at NBS (Novell
> Build Service) is a big advantage to keep our packages at high
> quality. OBS is better platform for cooperation.

Sort of. It has some additional features that are nice in theory but are
not really easy nor fun to use in practice (at least from my experience).

We could easily work as a team at Packman instead of "everyone on his
own" (which is not always the case, but almost always). TBH I'm quite
disappointed that this isn't the case right now, I was hoping for that
when I moved my packages to the Packman repository. Oh well.

We have a Subversion repository, an internal mailing-list, a nice
toolchain, and an IRC channel of our own. That's sufficient to work as a
team. Unfortunately, we're only a few on IRC, we don't really use the
mailing-list to discuss/inform, and not everyone is using pm-upload-job.

> 3. If Novell can provide such a service like security team attention
> in NBS then it is silly don't use this offer.

Myeah, that's true, but.. I'll believe it when I'll see it :)
The security team has already a lot of stuff to do, I don't think
they'll be able to monitor+help a few hundreds of additional packages.

> 4. Better resources. We can use infrastructure provided by Novell
> instead of our own and that our own use for something else like
> Factory build of packman, because I think you all agree Factory build
> of packman repository is not affordable for as at this time, we have
> only one build server and A LOT OF PACKAGES in our repo.

Yeah, that would be an advantage.

> So I think we not necessary have to migrate our package to NBS, but we
> need to start using OBS on our architecture.

I don't think so. We would lose a lot of features (priority queues,
notification bot, easy toolchain (pm-upload-job)) and I don't think we
have enough build power. Furthermore, it pushes a lot more changes into
the repository because it's automatic and dumb.
Packman already has the single biggest repository metadata to download
for openSUSE (except OSS, which you only download once), there is no
point in having automatisms touch a lot more packages (when not needed)
and force even more metadata downloading on our users.

cheers
- --
  -o) Pascal Bleser     http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
  /\\ <pascal.bleser at skynet.be>       <guru at unixtech.be>
 _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane.
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