[katello-devel] A couple of community-related questions

[Jan Pazdziora]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2012 at 10:09:46AM -0400, Hugh Brock wrote:
> 
> Third: I can't even begin to count the man-months we have expended on
> packaging gems as RPMs, tracking down their dependencies and packaging
> them, for no one's benefit but our own. *No one* uses the
> fedora-packaged rubygems that we spend so much effort on except us. We

Not even the users who want to install and use your software on
Fedora or on RHEL, rather than develop it? Users of the software
shouldn't even know that the thing is written in Ruby, or Python,
or Perl. Software on Fedora gets installed via rpm / yum, and that's
what the *users* should install on their rpm-based distribution.
Not to be forced to deal with packaging system specific to the
programming language used to develop the project.

It's been years since I had to run "perl -MCPAN ..." or "perl
Makefile.PL && make ..." for things I don't develop -- lately I just
do "yum install 'perl(The::Module')'", or even better, let the rpm
dependencies of the software's rpm handle it.

> then have to redo most of that work to make things work on RHEL. It's
> a total time-sink that our competitors simply do not have to deal
> with. For this reason, I'm pushing our upstream to ignore RPM
> packaging altogether and work "the ruby way." We'll package for RHEL
> as part of gearing up for product releases, and hopefully the advent
> of DSCs will make that a bit easier.

The early user adoption of new projects for RHEL should be in Fedora,
and those should be via rpm. Properly packaging the software in rpm
forces the maintainers to also think about things like SELinux,
things that competitors don't have to think about, but that are
essential for smooth integration in Fedora and RHEL.

For developers, The Ruby way makes sense. For users, they shouldn't
even know that there's some Ruby underneath.

-- 
Jan Pazdziora
Principal Software Engineer, Satellite Engineering, Red Hat