[hobbit] Future of Hobbit - Getting added to distro repos

[Henrik Stoerner]

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:
>
> 1. 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.

> 3. 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