[Freeipa-devel] client-only FreeIPA build

[Jan Cholasta]

On 22.11.2016 16:59, Lukas Slebodnik wrote:
> On (22/11/16 16:29), Petr Spacek wrote:
>> On 22.11.2016 16:27, Jan Cholasta wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On 22.11.2016 16:04, Petr Spacek wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> the recent changes with regard to
>>>> http://www.freeipa.org/page/V4/Integration_Improvements
>>>> beg a question whether we should invest into supporting client-only builds in
>>>> FreeIPA build system.
>>>>
>>>> Right now, FreeIPA can be built on all architectures we care about so there is
>>>> no incentive to invest into client-only build - this applies to binary/RPM
>>>> builds.
>>>
>>> Client-only build lowers the barrier for porting IPA to new platforms (porting
>>> only client code is *much* easier than porting the whole thing), so I would
>>> very much prefer if we kept it.
>>
>> Understood.
>>
> Agree about portability
>
> But upstream spec file needn't have such relicts.

I like to think about the upstream spec file as sort of a template for 
porting, so I can't say I agree. There is no other definitive, 
up-to-date  source of information about what are the dependencies, how 
to properly build IPA for downstream packaging and what needs to be 
executed on package install and upgrade.

> The upstream spec file is pure fedora specific.

Almost :-) The actual downstream Fedora spec file differs slightly, and 
the upstream spec file is actually usable on RHEL as well.

>
>> Wondering out loud: What prevents the "porter" from doing full build and then
>> packaging only client bits? Yes, he has to install come of the dependencies
>> for the build to pass but still, it is way easier than actually making server
>> fully functional.

The issue with this is that some of the dependencies might not had been 
ported as well, which would leave the porters to either do it 
themselves, which might not be a trivial task, or wait for someone else 
to do it, which might take ages.

Speaking from my own experience, when I was porting IPA client to Arch 
Linux [1], I had to port authconfig first. I had hard time doing it, 
harder than porting IPA client itself. I can't imagine how much harder 
would it be if I had to first port DS and Samba 4 with MIT Kerberos as well.

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/freeipa-client/

-- 
Jan Cholasta