[Linuxcoe-devel] Update on packaging

[Bruno C. <Bru...@hp...>]

Hello,

In order to help spread the adoption of LinuxCOE, I proposed to reuse
the setp of scripts/tools I developped for the MondoRescue project.

Looking at them, they were clearly too tightly integrated with mondo to
make an easy reuse, so I decided to re-start from scratch and write a
3rd version of my packaging tools, this time unrelated to a specific project.

This is called ProjectBuilder (aka pb). Cf:
http://trac.project-builder.org

The tool is written in perl, and provides the following functions:

        cms2build: Create tar files for the project under your CMS
                   CMS supported are SVN and CVS

        build2pkg: Create packages for your running distribution

        cms2pkg:   cms2build + build2pkg

        build2ssh: Send the tar files to a SSH host

        pkg2ssh:   Send the packages built to a SSH host

        build2vm:  Create packages in VMs, launching them if needed
                   and send those packages to a SSH host once built
                   VM type supported are QEMU

        cms2vm:    cms2build + build2vm

        launchvm:  Launch one virtual machine

        script2vm: Launch one virtual machine if needed
                   and executes a script on it


They are mostly all working for both mondo (SVN) and LinuxCOE (CVS).
I've produced last week my first packages for Mandriva (my native
distro) and I'm in the process of upgrading all my VMs (QEMU based) in
order to be able to produce my next MondoRescue version (2.2.5) using
that system (60% done). Once it's done, I'll also be able to generate 
packages for LinuxCOE for the same set of distro. All RPMs based distro 
are now working (fedora, rhel, mandriva, sles, suse), and I'm converting the
.deb based VMs. Gentoo, Slackware will follow.

Once it's done, I'll be able to share all those VMs (as long as you have
the necessary place to host them, as they represent around 50 GB right
now) so that everybody will be able to use the same mecanism to build
it's own project.

Now specifically for LinuxCOE, I've worked on systemdesigner and
systemdesigner-docs packages up to now. But in order to have a useful
system, I'd need a package supporting one distribution.
But (there is always a but ;-), packaging a set of binary files is
really not appealing to me.

Have someone already worked on a script that would allow to generate
from a distro the files needed by LinuxCOE, without embedding them in a
package ? (after all it's generated so shouldn't be part of neither the
package, nor the CVS IMHO) ?

At the point I'm now, I'd need to work on that soon, so any already
existing tool would help, if not I'll begin to look at that for Mandriva
(which will also help adding support for that distro ;-) keeping in mind
the genericity needed for other distro as well.

WDYT ?

Another problem I have is with the versioning of the LinuxCOE project.
Where are those version number handled ? Is there a subverion ? When a
new package is released, will it be 4.1 ? 4.0.1 ? What granularity do
you want ?

Thanks in advance for your feedback,
Bruno.
-- 
Linux Profession Lead EMEA  / Open Source Evangelist \        HP C&I EMEA IET
http://www.mondorescue.org / HP/Intel Solution Center \  http://hpintelco.net
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