[ckan-dev] CKAN Debian Packaging Community Meetup

[James Gardner]

Hi all,

[After this email let's keep this discussion on ckan-dev now that people 
know about the community meet up shall we?]

1. Multiple distributions

Nils is right, it is a lot of work getting package dependencies correct 
for just one distribution, and since all the OKF's servers run Ubuntu 
LTS, that's the one we've concentrated our initial efforts on. The .deb 
vs .rpm issue isn't such a big deal, we can build packages for either, 
its really just the time it takes to get all the dependencies right and 
do the thorough testing required to make sure the install doesn't cause 
problems for any existing software running on the system.

Having said that we've overcome the first hurdle and learned a lot by 
getting CKAN packaged for one distribution, so I agree with Nils that if 
there was enough interest we could have have community members host 
"unofficial" versions for other distributions (Ubutnu 10.10, Centos 5 
etc). We could help with that effort and perhaps over time make them 
official too. For the moment though, I think we should concnetrate on 
making the packaged CKAN for Ubuntu 10.04 really good, and if that work 
goes well I'd love to see a version of CKAN available out of the box on 
the next Ubuntu LTS in April 2012.

2. Minor versions

@Marc Actually we've done the opposite of what you suggest and, where 
packages aren't available in Ubuntu itself, we've been very strict about 
precisely which versions of dependencies we need. Although it would be 
nice if we could, it simply isn't possible to support both Pylons 0.9.7 
and 0.10 and 1.0 etc all at the same time. The same goes for other 
dependencies too.

3. Buildbot

@Matthew, yes we actually already use BuildBot to run our automated test 
CKAN test suites, it uses pip to install CKAN and its dependencies 
before running the tests. I'm also developing a piece of software called 
BuildKit which, once BuildBot has run, will take the tested code and 
generate the .deb packages automatically. I'll be talking about it at 
the community meetup.

Cheers,

James



On 21/09/11 07:54, Matthew Brett wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 11:46 PM, Nils Toedtmann
> <nils.toedtmann at okfn.org>  wrote:
>> Hi *
>>
>>
>> [ James: i hope it's ok if i chip in here :-)  ]
>>
>>
>> Maintaining packages for different target systems is quite some work.
>>
>> E.g. many interesting distributions do not come with all libraries CKAN
>> relies on, or with too old versions. In these cases one has to package
>> the missing libs without running into conflicts (e.g. CKAN requires
>> linxyz>= 2.0, but target distro only provides linxyz-1.5, and has other
>> packages which depend on linxyz<= 1.5). Therefore "one debian and one
>> rpm package" won't cut it. Instead, each distribution release might need
>> its own, slightly different set of additional library packages.
>>
>> We currently do not have the capacity to do that. If we happened to
>> package for more targets ourselves, i assume ubuntu-current (11.04) and
>> debian stable came first.
>>
>> That said, package maintenance could be a good task for volunteers.
>>
>> So if one is familiar with debian or rpm-style packaging and wants to
>> help out, please come forward :-)
>>
>> /nils.
> I'm working on a set of projects that can be hard to build; we're
> using buildbot:
>
> http://nipy.bic.berkeley.edu/
>
> Setup is relatively straightforward:
>
> https://github.com/nipy/nibotmi/blob/master/install.rst
> https://github.com/nipy/nibotmi/blob/master/master.cfg
>
> Buildout is good for testing that you've recorded all the
> dependencies, at least for packages that easy_install in a pleasant
> way.   I'm sure you know that though,
>
> Cheers,
>
> Matthew
>
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