[Server-devel] Tidy up of the xs-0.5 yum repo - what differentiates OLPC's XS from vanilla Fedora?

[Martin Langhoff]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 3:47 PM, Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-11-17 at 14:23 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
>> A couple packages with custom patches...
>> ./ejabberd-xs-2.0.1-10.xs9.olpc.i386.rpm
>> ./ejabberd-xs-2.0.1-11.fc9.olpc.i386.rpm
>> ./moodle-xs-1.9.2.xs2.13.gdeb43cf-1.xs9.noarch.rpm
>
> For these, what's the path to getting the patches available upstream?

In the case of ejabberd, I think the current set of patches are
upstream or will soon be. But we're very likely to have another round
of patches for the next release cycle of the XS, so likely that we'll
keep rebuilding ejabberd-xs for a while. Some of them are backports
and might be Fedora material, I'll ping the maintainer. Medium-term I
guess we can converge.

With moodle-xs, I am about to do serious OLPC-specific customisations
to it. I'm part of the upstream team in this case, so lots/most of it
I hope will apear in a future release of Moodle as configurable
options. And again, by the time these are in a release upstream I'll
probably have even more patches in my moodle-xs.

But I doubt moodle-xs will converge with a moodle package -- we're
goingto be carrying a custom version of it, perhaps forever. Maybe I
should have listed it in the "xs specific" set.

So in short I don't mind carrying these custom packages at all. They
are very much at the heart of what makes the School Server special,
codebases where we're pushing forward with new development so from a
Fedora perspective  I would say what we're doing with ejabberd-xs and
moodle-xs is too risky and not appropriate for a general purpose
distro.

So my path to happiness and high productivity with Fedora looks like

 - if the first set of packages I mentioned earlier can find its way
into a Fedora release (this looks easy, and mostly underway)

 - old-style network scripts are not deprecated ;-)

 - the anaconda-yum-rpm-revisor toolchain gets its many kinks sorted
out (I have to say thanks to many people in the buildsys and anaconda
lists for the many suggestions and workarounds)

 - the crystal ball tells me which Fedora release is likely to turn
into the base for a RHEL so I can base my LTS release on that...

and we'll continue innovating daringly on top of Fedora. That's what
we're here for :-)

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
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