[El] Custom RPM repositories structure

[Peter Hopfgartner]

On Wed, 2010-06-16 at 13:46 +0200, Mathieu Baudier wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I would like to have your opinion on how we should structure the
> custom RPM repositories (that is the repositories where we maintain
> our GIS packages when those in EPEL are not enough).
> 
> I think that there are two dimensions to consider for each package:
> A - whether the package requires to update the base EL ('plus' vs.
> 'extras' to keep the CentOS nomenclature)
> B - how new is the package version
> 
> I guess that there is not much discussion about A, and that we should
> keep packages that require to update base EL in distinct repositories.
> 
> With regards to B, the question is: do we always want to have the
> latest stable version of a given package?
> Or does it make sense to also maintain older ones?
> 
Hi Mathieu,

would it make sense, that to make different repositories for each major
version?

As a user, I would say that at any time a "yum update" should never
break the current system, new packages should only include severe bug
fixes.

If I would like to switch to a newer set of packages, I would not mind
to do something like the following:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh
http://<repo_server>/<repo_path>/elgis-release-2010-04.noarch.rpm'

The first version would start with current versions.

> Here are a few examples:
> 
> # QGIS
> Currently we know how to package v1.0.2 which is their LTS (Long Term
> Support) version as well as v1.4.0 (both require a newer version of QT
> and thus update base)
> Would anybody want to use QGIS v1.0.2 rather than v1.4.0?
> 
Personally speaking: no, I use 1.4 and appreciate the newer feature set.
But I agree that this is in some way in opposition to the "enterprise ==
stable" equation.
> # GRASS
> Currently we know how to package v6.2.3 as well as v6.4.0RC6 which is
> a release candidate for 6.4.
> This is a different case since 6.4 is not yet a stable version, so
> this should probably rather go to a "-testing" repository (similar to
> epel-testing).
> 
Indeed, GRASS is the only package, where we install a not officially
stable package, but 6.4 has some thing that we rely on.

> This 6.4.0RC6 version works pretty well as far as I could see, but we
> have problems with the wxUI interface (see this thread:
> http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/2010-June/056458.html) and
> we are currently trying to fix them so that the related fixes could go
> into 6.4.
> 
> But the question remains: would anybody want to use an older version
> of GRASS than the latest stable?
> Will it still make sense to maintain a GRASS v6.2 when GRASS v6.4 is out?
> 
This would not as much be an issue with the versioned repositories
above.

> # PostGIS
> With server/database side components the question is probably more
> relevant since the data format may change etc. so an upgrade to the
> next stable may have to be done carefully and may depend on other
> constraints (esp. if it requires to upgrade PostgreSQL as well).
> 
> We currently know how to package:
> v1.3.6
> v1.4.1
> v1.5.1
> 
> Would you be interested in having the v1.3.x and v1.4.x being
> maintained as well as the latest (v1.5.x)?
> 
> #
> # A proposal
> #
> I'm not too keen in having "-stable" and "-unstable" nomenclatures
> since we plan to support stable versions only (we can always have
> additional "-testing" repositories for... testing, like we currently
> do with GRASS) and it implies that, say, PostGIS v1.5.x would be less
> stable that v1.3.x which is not our point here.
> 
I agree that testing and stable may be enough. As I see this project,
unstable should possibly never happen here, since only stable packages
are taken and the package dependency graph is quite shallow.

(...)

> Many thanks in advance for your comments and feedback on your real-life needs!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Mathieu
> _______________________________________________
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> el at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/el

Thank you, Mathieu, for all the effort you are putting into this!

Peter
-- 
Dott. Peter Hopfgartner

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