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

[Dmitri Dolguikh]

I think the rpm/yum vs. gems (or eggs, or CPAN) discussion is not very 
useful. We have two rather distinct groups of people in our community - 
those who only use software, and those who also [help to] develop it. It 
is my *very* strong opinion that we need to support both.

On 02/08/12 03:48 PM, Jan Pazdziora wrote:
> 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.
I'm afraid you can't mandate the platform[s] of your choice to the 
community, at least in the oss world, period (incidentally, that's one 
of the reasons for recent conversations about packaging for debian's 
apt-get). You could, however, say something like: "We do our development 
on Fedora and RHEL. You'll find that at the moment it is easier to run 
katello on these platforms, and you'll be able to try new features sooner."
> For developers, The Ruby way makes sense. For users, they shouldn't
> even know that there's some Ruby underneath.
>
-d