Future of Hobbit - Getting added to distro repos
I am going to attempt to drive getting Hobbit added to the Centos Plus repository, but first we need to figure out a few things:
- Who will create and maintain the RPMs I'd rather someone with experience creating and maintaining distribution packages do this, but if all else fails I will volunteer.
- Resolution of common problems when installing Hobbit on RHEL/CentOS
Here are problems I have encountered in the past:
- SELINUX blocks access to hobbit cgi and web content (and probably the creation of suid hobbitping). So the RPM installer script needs to set the proper security context on the files.
- librrdtool is not provided in the RHEL or CentOS/CentOS Plus repository (so even if you had a Hobbit RPM, you would have to go and get 3 rrdtool packages (rrdtool, rrdtool-devel, and perl-rrdtool) from the DAG repository. Possible resolution is to also get rrdtool added to CentOS Plus.
- Figuring out what would be the most common/preferred/accepted installation dirs for Hobbit. Last week I installed the FC5 rpm, and it installed to /etc/hobbit, whereas the tarball by default installs to a subdirectory of /home. Some people like system tools to be in a "system" directory, while others like being able to install to a user space controlled location.
Any other ideas? Am I leaving anything out? I'd really like to see Hobbit be an available package on "RedHat" (RHEL, CentOS), as well as Fedora.
-Charles
On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 01:18:56PM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
I am going to attempt to drive getting Hobbit added to the Centos Plus repository, but first we need to figure out a few things:
- Who will create and maintain the RPMs I'd rather someone with experience creating and maintaining distribution packages do this, but if all else fails I will volunteer.
One reason why I hesitate to contact the various distributions is that I don't know what their normal practice is for package maintainers. Some
- like Red Hat - have their own team, others depend on volunteers. And some just pick up one of their distribution brethren.
- librrdtool is not provided in the RHEL or CentOS/CentOS Plus repository (so even if you had a Hobbit RPM, you would have to go and get 3 rrdtool packages (rrdtool, rrdtool-devel, and perl-rrdtool) from the DAG repository.
Major issue. rrdtool is used by a lot of software packages.
- Figuring out what would be the most common/preferred/accepted installation dirs for Hobbit. Last week I installed the FC5 rpm, and it installed to /etc/hobbit, whereas the tarball by default installs to a subdirectory of /home. Some people like system tools to be in a "system" directory, while others like being able to install to a user space controlled location.
There is actually a standard for this: The Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). The packaging scripts that come with Hobbit tries to follow it.
One of the things that FHS/LSB dictates is that you do not EVER install software in /home or /usr/local . Architecture dependant binaries go in /usr, configuration files in /etc, logs in /var/log, data files in /var and so on. Wikipedia has a brief overview of this in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard
Regards, Henrik
I'm using CentOS but I always install rpmforge once the install is done. I know for a fact that rrdtool is in either the CentOS or rpmforge repo's. If you're correct that the rrdtool isn't on the CentOS repo, it is on the rpmforge one.
It is a VERY easy install:
http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories/RPMForge
Here's a snip from my install notes:
yum -y install yum-priorities wget http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/RPMS.dag/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf... rpm --import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.*.rpm rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.*.rpm yum -y install gcc gcc-c++ pcre-devel libpng-devel openssl-devel openldap-devel fping rrdtool-devel yum -y update
On 1/30/08, Henrik Stoerner <henrik at hswn.dk> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 01:18:56PM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
I am going to attempt to drive getting Hobbit added to the Centos Plus repository, but first we need to figure out a few things:
- Who will create and maintain the RPMs I'd rather someone with experience creating and maintaining distribution packages do this, but if all else fails I will volunteer.
One reason why I hesitate to contact the various distributions is that I don't know what their normal practice is for package maintainers. Some
- like Red Hat - have their own team, others depend on volunteers. And some just pick up one of their distribution brethren.
- librrdtool is not provided in the RHEL or CentOS/CentOS Plus repository (so even if you had a Hobbit RPM, you would have to go and get 3 rrdtool packages (rrdtool, rrdtool-devel, and perl-rrdtool) from the DAG repository.
Major issue. rrdtool is used by a lot of software packages.
- Figuring out what would be the most common/preferred/accepted installation dirs for Hobbit. Last week I installed the FC5 rpm, and it installed to /etc/hobbit, whereas the tarball by default installs to a subdirectory of /home. Some people like system tools to be in a "system" directory, while others like being able to install to a user space controlled location.
There is actually a standard for this: The Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). The packaging scripts that come with Hobbit tries to follow it.
One of the things that FHS/LSB dictates is that you do not EVER install software in /home or /usr/local . Architecture dependant binaries go in /usr, configuration files in /etc, logs in /var/log, data files in /var and so on. Wikipedia has a brief overview of this in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard
Regards, Henrik
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-- Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373
Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. --- Henry Spencer
Josh Luthman wrote:
I'm using CentOS but I always install rpmforge once the install is done. I know for a fact that rrdtool is in either the CentOS or rpmforge repo's. If you're correct that the rrdtool isn't on the CentOS repo, it is on the rpmforge one. Indeed, rpmforge = DAGs. In the past I have both installed the rpmforge repo, and also just manually fetched rrdtool, rrdtool-devel, and perl-rrdtool from http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rrdtool/
I install a lot of things from rpmforge and it is very convenient to do a yum -y install package1 package2 and switch do a different ssh session. Fetching them one by one is a great solution if you only need a package or two, though.
On 1/30/08, Charles Jones <jonescr at cisco.com> wrote:
Josh Luthman wrote:
I'm using CentOS but I always install rpmforge once the install is done. I know for a fact that rrdtool is in either the CentOS or rpmforge repo's. If you're correct that the rrdtool isn't on the CentOS repo, it is on the rpmforge one. Indeed, rpmforge = DAGs. In the past I have both installed the rpmforge repo, and also just manually fetched rrdtool, rrdtool-devel, and perl-rrdtool from http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rrdtool/
To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
-- Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373
Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. --- Henry Spencer
On Wednesday 30 January 2008 23:15:04 Josh Luthman wrote:
I'm using CentOS but I always install rpmforge once the install is done. I know for a fact that rrdtool is in either the CentOS or rpmforge repo's. If you're correct that the rrdtool isn't on the CentOS repo, it is on the rpmforge one.
It is a VERY easy install:
Just for reference, our policy doesn't allow the use of 3rd-party repositories ... but we run our own internally. It really would be best to get Hobbit into EPEL.
Regards, Buchan
Henrik Stoerner wrote:
On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 01:18:56PM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
I am going to attempt to drive getting Hobbit added to the Centos Plus repository, but first we need to figure out a few things:
- Who will create and maintain the RPMs I'd rather someone with experience creating and maintaining distribution packages do this, but if all else fails I will volunteer.
One reason why I hesitate to contact the various distributions is that I don't know what their normal practice is for package maintainers. Some
- like Red Hat - have their own team, others depend on volunteers. And some just pick up one of their distribution brethren.
Red Hat offers other monitoring tools and solutions (i.e. a plugin for RHN Satelitte and Red Hat Command Center) that they are pushing, so I think Hobbit is more likely to make its way into RHEL5 through Cent OS or the EPEL repos (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL).
Tom
Henrik Stoerner wrote:
On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 01:18:56PM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
I am going to attempt to drive getting Hobbit added to the Centos Plus repository, but first we need to figure out a few things:
- Who will create and maintain the RPMs I'd rather someone with experience creating and maintaining distribution packages do this, but if all else fails I will volunteer.
One reason why I hesitate to contact the various distributions is that I don't know what their normal practice is for package maintainers. Some
- like Red Hat - have their own team, others depend on volunteers. And some just pick up one of their distribution brethren.
Same problem here. Apparently though I am told that one of the persons involved in managing CentOS Plus is a member of our local LUG. I intend to get some information from him and perhaps his help on getting the packages we need included.
- librrdtool is not provided in the RHEL or CentOS/CentOS Plus repository (so even if you had a Hobbit RPM, you would have to go and get 3 rrdtool packages (rrdtool, rrdtool-devel, and perl-rrdtool) from the DAG repository.
Major issue. rrdtool is used by a lot of software packages.
Agreed. It is available via third party repos, but that creates extra steps to successfully install Hobbit. If they will accept Hobbit perhaps they will accept rrdtool as well.
- Figuring out what would be the most common/preferred/accepted installation dirs for Hobbit. Last week I installed the FC5 rpm, and it installed to /etc/hobbit, whereas the tarball by default installs to a subdirectory of /home. Some people like system tools to be in a "system" directory, while others like being able to install to a user space controlled location.
There is actually a standard for this: The Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). The packaging scripts that come with Hobbit tries to follow it.
One of the things that FHS/LSB dictates is that you do not EVER install software in /home or /usr/local . Architecture dependant binaries go in /usr, configuration files in /etc, logs in /var/log, data files in /var and so on. Wikipedia has a brief overview of this in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard
Hmm everytime I have installed Hobbit from source, it asks what user Hobbit will run as, and then defaults to installing in /home/user. Here is the basic dir layout you get from FC5 rpm install: /etc/hobbit/bb-hosts /etc/hobbit/web /usr/bin/bb /usr/lib/hobbit/cgi-bin /usr/lib/hobbit/server/etc /usr/lib/hobbit/server/bin/bb /var/lib/hobbit/www /var/log/hobbit
-Charles
On Wednesday 30 January 2008 22:18:56 Charles Jones wrote:
I am going to attempt to drive getting Hobbit added to the Centos Plus repository, but first we need to figure out a few things:
- Who will create and maintain the RPMs
The Mandriva SRPMS (which I maintain) already build fine on RHEL (2.1, 3, 4, 5). Please take a look at the changes there, they would most likely be required by any distro with a sane packaging policy.
I'd rather someone with experience creating and maintainingdistribution packages do this, but if all else fails I will volunteer. 2. Resolution of common problems when installing Hobbit on RHEL/CentOS Here are problems I have encountered in the past:
- SELINUX blocks access to hobbit cgi and web content (and probably the creation of suid hobbitping). So the RPM installer script needs to set the proper security context on the files.
I'll try and take a look, it should be a relatively simple thing to fix (maybe in a %post scriptlet).
- librrdtool is not provided in the RHEL or CentOS/CentOS Plus repository (so even if you had a Hobbit RPM, you would have to go and get 3 rrdtool packages (rrdtool, rrdtool-devel, and perl-rrdtool) from the DAG repository. Possible resolution is to also get rrdtool added to CentOS Plus.
Again, I rebuild the Mandriva SRPM :-).
- Figuring out what would be the most common/preferred/accepted installation dirs for Hobbit. Last week I installed the FC5 rpm, and it installed to /etc/hobbit, whereas the tarball by default installs to a subdirectory of /home. Some people like system tools to be in a "system" directory, while others like being able to install to a user space controlled location.
Distribution policies normally outlaw the placement of files on /home by a package. Please compare to the vast number of similar packages, typically the home directory is set to a location under /var/lib, or if the package doesn't allow that, /usr/lib(64)?
Any other ideas? Am I leaving anything out? I'd really like to see Hobbit be an available package on "RedHat" (RHEL, CentOS), as well as Fedora.
I might consider starting to maintain some of my Mandriva packages in parallel in Fedora, since they are very compatible. Wasting more time on a separate package would be a waste.
I'll try and publish my Hobbit packages later today (at http://staff.telkomsa.net/packages, where OpenLDAP rebuilds from Mandriva on RHEL are already quite popular).
Regards, Buchan
participants (5)
-
bgmilne＠staff.telkomsa.net
-
henrik＠hswn.dk
-
jonescr＠cisco.com
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josh＠imaginenetworksllc.com
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tomg＠mcclatchyinteractive.com