[Fedora-packaging] Fedora Packaging Committee Meeting (Tuesday July 22)

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 08:06:59AM -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
>> On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 10:29 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>>> What is the board's rationale for putting MinGW packages in a separate
>>> repository, when other cross-compiler toolchain (eg ARM) are in the main
>>> Fedora repository. Seems to me like we're penalizing MinGW  just
>>> because it happens to be related to Windows, even though MinGW's code
>>> is still just as open source as anything else in our repos.
>> Actually I think the prevailing thought that the Board has (although
>> it's up to FESCo to really nail it down) is that the mingw tools
>> themselves are absolutely suitable for Fedora.  The libraries compiled
>> against it for windows use are what should be in another repo.
> 
> [I'm going to prepare something more detailed, hopefully integrating
> efforts with the cross-compiler folks, but just on these two points ...]
> 
> If we ship only the four base packages (mingw-gcc, mingw-binutils,
> mingw-w32api and mingw-runtime) then the only software that can be
> compiled is software which doesn't use any libraries.  That's pretty
> restrictive.
> 
> To compile, for example, libvirt, one needs six other libraries.  As
> with Linux, you need the library around (foo-0.dll) in order to link.
> Anyone compiling libvirt would need to download the source for each of
> these six libraries and './configure --host=i686-pc-mingw32 ; make ;
> make install' before they could start on libvirt, and of course it
> isn't really that simple since those libraries don't all just
> cross-compile without needing tweaks and patches.  Tweaks and patches
> are what spec files are for.  This is why we'd like to ship
> pre-compiled DLLs (only) of those six libs.
> 
When people talk about a separate repo, it's something that would still 
allow this workflow to happen.  The separate repo exists on the Fedora 
master mirror but mirrors of us have the option to include or exclude 
these other repos depending on their ability to carry the extra packages.

This separate repo will have a yum configuration file that I think 
should be shipped by default.  I think it should also be turned on by 
default.  This would make the fact that there is a different repo for 
the packages transparent to end users.  (However, this portion is 
something that FESCo decides, not FPC... this case would need to be 
argued in front of FESCo).

> I think people have somehow got the impression we want to (a) ship
> FIREFOX.EXE and/or (b) cross-compile every library in Fedora.  I'd
> like to say that (a) is not our intention, ever, and (b) isn't even
> technically possible, nevermind that it is completely undesirable.
> 
Who is "we"?  That is the crux of your statements.  If a group of Fedora 
contributors who are not the libvirt team decide that they want to have 
a complete cross-compilation environment to be able to build firefox.exe 
  for windows under Fedora at some point in the future, I'd like us to 
not stand in their way.  OTOH, even if that never happens, there is 
still the issue that MingW is not the only crosscompilation system that 
we want in Fedora.  To scale across architectures as well as in depth on 
one os-architecture also has an impact on mirrors which can be mitigated 
by having a separate repo.

>> My personal opinion is that if you're going to need to munge spec files
>> in order to produce packages built against mingw, those munges need to
>> be done outside our cvs repo as well.
> 
> There are two ways that we've proposed that one could build
> 'mingw-gnutls'.  One is as a completely separate package, another is
> as a subpackage of the ordinary gnutls.  I investigated and built
> packages both ways (see links below) just to see what was technically
> feasible.  It turns out that both methods are *technically* feasible.
> Which is better from technical, organizational or political points of
> view is a completely different question.
> 
This is partially a FPC issue and partially a FESCo/Board issue.  The 
four people present for the FPC meeting last week discussed this 
informally and there was consensus that separate packging made more 
sense.  However, FESCo will need to decide how having a separate 
download repository maps to our cvs repository.  The two options I see 
are separate packages (as discussed by FPC) and separate branches within 
CVS.  Which one is decided will have some influence over any eventual 
Guidelines that the FPC writes and/or approves.

-Toshio

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