Software in infrastructure vs repositories

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Tue May 29 17:12:05 UTC 2007


On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 11:26 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> > Once upon a time Wednesday 16 May 2007, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >> Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> >>> Once upon a time Wednesday 16 May 2007, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >>>> Hi
> >>>>
> >>>> Has Fedora Infrastructure team consider a rule not to deploy any
> >>>> proprietary software and not even any software that is not available in
> >>>> the official Fedora repository? That would make things easier for
> >>>> ensuring good packaging, maintenance and licensing.
> >>> That is what our rules are.  we only use what is in Fedora.  if there is
> >>> some OSS thing we need we get it in Fedora before we use it.
> >> Can you document this anywhere?
> > it has been documented in many mailing list posts in the past as well as 
> > common knowledge.  if that's not enough.  my post from before should suffice
> > 

> Do you honestly believe that mailing lists posts are going to serve this 
> purpose? Would it be ok if I document it in the wiki?
> 
By all means, go ahead and add it to a good place on the wiki.

One caveat to this general policy is that we may create custom programs
from time to time and, although it is OSS, we haven't built tarballs and
made a "release".  These apps are usually tailored for our environment
but they solve problems that are part of creating any large distro... so
others could pitch in and make it more general if they wanted.  These
are not currently required to be packaged for Fedora.  We do seem to be
trying to put the code into hosted.fp.o so people can get it.  (Pkgdb is
absent from hosted... I'll make sure I get it added when we deploy.)

Do people think this is an allowable exception?  These apps are in a
grey area between one-off system administration scripts and applications
that are present in multiple environments already.  I think they must be
OSS and their source must be available but I'm not sure if the
requirement that they be packaged for Fedora is necessary.

I also foresee us running into issues at some point with version
mismatches between the Fedora/EPEL packages and what we run on our
servers.  Maybe we want to upgrade the TurboGears stack on our servers
but we don't want to change the API for EPEL.  Maybe we are putting out
necessary updates for the apps we are working on but upgrading the bits
in Fedora/EPEL every two days doesn't seem like a good idea.  We need to
have some ability to separate what we package for Fedora from what we
are actively developing in Infrastructure.

-Toshio
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/attachments/20070529/9b0a49c4/attachment.sig>


More information about the Fedora-infrastructure-list mailing list