Jessie Keating, F13 (’cause his keyboard goes up to 13). Fedora Release Engineering. Very open topic – how its done, how he’d like to get it done. New build system trying to get open-sourced from RedHat, replacing Plague.
His job: marshall package collection and keep them working. “DistFC7” is a package collection of everything in FC6 plus Extras. “Rawhide” nightly build. Regularly, create a freeze. Tags are fairly inexpensive, so “F7Test1” is easy to apply. Spin off freeze, run intensive tests on that tag. Different “spins” or collections of tests are done for each frozen tag: desktop, server, KDE “spins” are coordinated by Jessie. Questions remain on how to triage failed builds – what qualifies as a showstopper.
“Pungi” builds a distribution from a manifest, based on multiple languages and architectures. Reads from core repositories, extras, locals, finds the “best” module, resolves all of the dependencies to build a tree of source. Hands off the anaconda tools, build-install, that actually creates images. Next step involves sorting the many package dependencies to create a package order that would allow install from CD1, CD2, CD3. There’s a magic XML file called “comps” that is a combination of experience, black magic and wild guesses. Then, making ISO file systems requires its own black magic as there are a lot of obscure flags that differ depending on the target of i386, PPC, 64-bit and so forth.
Needed: post-build validation before handing things off to QA. Bloat is an issue: a 9-CD, 2DVD distro is hostile, expecially to bandwidth-expensive. Would like to create some different images that don’t include the kitchen sink: “desktop” that’s a browser, chat, email, etc. “server” is a base set plus a set of optional servers. “KDE” spin. Would like to be able to add additional recipies, like an “Eclipse” spin that has a fully-configured install with all the dev tools ready to go. Need help with fine-tuning the manifest. Sorting through the (many bizarrely-named) hardware packages. Need help with “comps” – how to overlay the different issues of dependencies and choices, mandatory, default and priorites.
I never knew how sausage was made 😉
Oh, and then there’s the issue of updates…
Tag: fudconboston2007