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

[Buchan Milne]

On Wednesday 30 January 2008 22:18:56 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

The Mandriva SRPMS (which I maintain) already build fine on RHEL (2.1, 3, 4, 
5). Please take a look at the changes there, they would most likely be 
required by any distro with a sane packaging policy.

>     I'd rather someone with experience creating and maintaining
> distribution packages do this, but if all else fails I will volunteer.
> 2. Resolution of common problems when installing Hobbit on RHEL/CentOS
>    Here are problems I have encountered in the past:
>    * SELINUX blocks access to hobbit cgi and web content (and probably
> the creation of suid hobbitping). So the RPM installer script needs to
> set the proper security context on the files.

I'll try and take a look, it should be a relatively simple thing to fix (maybe 
in a %post scriptlet).

>    * 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.  Possible resolution is to also get rrdtool added to
> CentOS Plus.

Again, I rebuild the Mandriva SRPM :-).

> 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.

Distribution policies normally outlaw the placement of files on /home by a 
package. Please compare to the vast number of similar packages, typically the 
home directory is set to a location under /var/lib, or if the package doesn't 
allow that, /usr/lib(64)?

> Any other ideas? Am I leaving anything out?
> I'd really like to see Hobbit be an available package on "RedHat" (RHEL,
> CentOS), as well as Fedora.

I might consider starting to maintain some of my Mandriva packages in parallel 
in Fedora, since they are very compatible. Wasting more time on a separate 
package would be a waste.

I'll try and publish my Hobbit packages later today (at 
http://staff.telkomsa.net/packages, where OpenLDAP rebuilds from Mandriva on 
RHEL are already quite popular).

Regards,
Buchan