[WBEL-devel] WBEL4 progress update

[John Morris]

On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 17:14, Simon J Mudd wrote:
> Hi John,
> 
> Just a couple of comments. Will you be providing/documenting the complete 
> "build environment" you use to make WB4?

Yup.  Go grab the buildutils and look in the README files.  The version
for 4 isn't the most recent but the one for 3.95 should be current for
everything I did to install RHEL4beta2 and get it ready for making the
initial build run of the 4 SRPMS.  When 4 goes out I'll freeze the
current versions of the scripts and post that version.

> It might be nice if you also considered providing a diff of the RH SRPMS 
> against the ones you build (if you can not rebuild the rpm without 
> change).  I have a small script ftp://ftp.wl0.org/rpmdiff/rpmdiff which 
> makes these differences nice and easy to see. I understand that where you 
> provide a whitebox-something instead of a redhat-something RPM that this 
> may not make sense.

I don't provide diffs, but whenever possible I leave the original
tarball alone and just insert a package-whitebox.patch file so changes
would be limited to that file and the .spec itself.  And any file
changed will either have whitebox (as in whitebox-release) or
.WB[:digit:] at the end of the version number.  Another giveaway is to
look at the signature on the srpm.  If it is signed by RH or Fedora I
didn't change it, which is the case for +-95% of the packages.

> Finally I know of no repository / URL which mentions external RPMS which 
> work on RHEL3/RHEL4. It might be nice if external packages not included 
> with the distribution could be referenced somewhere thus making them 
> easier to find.  Would anyone be interested in providing this information?

Dag, jpackage, rpmfind, etc. all have packages. Any package for RHEL3 is
believed to correctly install on WBEL3 and the other way around.  As in
the WBEL3 packages posted on WineHQ also install on RHEL and the other
rebuilds.  Any user level app packaged for RH9 should also install
without problems.  No real need for me to duplicate the effort others
are already putting there.  RHEL is always going to be targeted more
then WB ever will and Google knows all... and tells most of it.  :)

However I have been pondering something for WBEL4.  It's version of yum
is from FC3 and supports /etc/yum.repos.d.  Instead of providing
commented out entries for various repos, would it be better to provide
rpm packages that could be installed to install support for them?  What
are other distros doing in this regard and what naming conventions
already exist?  

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris     This post is 100% M$Free!
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