Re: rpm support for 7.4 and beyond

I haven't seen any discussion on the topic, so thought I might start
one. We currently provide rpms for Red Hat 7.x, 8.x, and 9, and I'm
assuming that we'll have rpms for all of those for 7.4 once release time
rolls around. However, given that Red Hat is dropping support for 7.x
and 8.x version on Jan 1st, and Red Hat 9 next April, do the current rpm
builders forsee any issues with providing rpms for those platforms in
the future?

Also (and maybe someone from Red Hat can weigh in here) are there any
plans from Red Hat to release RHEL rpms for postgresql in the future,
and/or plans to make sure the community rpm builders would have access
to those platforms in order to build rpms against them?

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Robert Treat <xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net> writes:
> Also (and maybe someone from Red Hat can weigh in here) are there any
> plans from Red Hat to release RHEL rpms for postgresql in the future,

I can tell you that Red Hat is getting beat up regularly for having
omitted Postgres (and MySQL!) from RHEL 3. If you are a paying RHEL
customer, make sure you let them know you're not happy about it.

Upper management keep changing their mind about how exactly they want
to support these databases on RHEL --- well, okay, that's a business
decision and outside my sphere as an engineer. But in the meantime the
effective support is "none at all", and people have got to hold their
feet to the fire about it.

regards, tom lane

Tom Lane wrote:

>Robert Treat <xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net> writes:
>
>
>>Also (and maybe someone from Red Hat can weigh in here) are there any
>>plans from Red Hat to release RHEL rpms for postgresql in the future,
>>
>>
>
>I can tell you that Red Hat is getting beat up regularly for having
>omitted Postgres (and MySQL!) from RHEL 3. If you are a paying RHEL
>customer, make sure you let them know you're not happy about it.
>
>Upper management keep changing their mind about how exactly they want
>to support these databases on RHEL --- well, okay, that's a business
>decision and outside my sphere as an engineer. But in the meantime the
>effective support is "none at all", and people have got to hold their
>feet to the fire about it.
>
>
>

I just spent 15 minutes searching on the RH web site trying to locate a
complete list of packages in the various RHEL personalities, with
conspicuous lack of success. How anyone can make decisions about it
without knowing exactly what is in it is beyond me.

To answer Robert's original question, I suspect that there will be many
corporate and individual users of RH 7.x, 8 and 9 for quite some time,
and providing RPMs for these will be highly desirable. I currently have
access to one of each of these (fairly vanilla installations, too), and
can help out if need be while that lasts - I have no plans to upgrade
any of them right now, and would only want to do so if some critical
issue came up that forced it - we are behind a firewall so even remote
root exploits might not make me upgrade.

cheers

andrew

On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 10:23, Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Treat <xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net> writes:
> > Also (and maybe someone from Red Hat can weigh in here) are there any
> > plans from Red Hat to release RHEL rpms for postgresql in the future,
>
> I can tell you that Red Hat is getting beat up regularly for having
> omitted Postgres (and MySQL!) from RHEL 3. If you are a paying RHEL
> customer, make sure you let them know you're not happy about it.
>
> Upper management keep changing their mind about how exactly they want
> to support these databases on RHEL --- well, okay, that's a business
> decision and outside my sphere as an engineer. But in the meantime the
> effective support is "none at all", and people have got to hold their
> feet to the fire about it.
>

well, i'm not now, but if they want me to become a paying RHEL customer
they better make me feel secure that there is going to be some support
for postgresql on those platforms, even if it's just a statement that
they'll give "Lamar & Company" free access to the flavors of RHEL to do
community rpm building.

Personally I don't find any of their current RHEL offerings that
enticing given that the extent of my support needs over the last year or
so involved downloading maybe two kernel patches and an ssh patch, but
I've got a number of Red Hat 7.3 servers I'll eventually have to
transition to *something* sooner or later...

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

I wrote:

>
> I just spent 15 minutes searching on the RH web site trying to locate
> a complete list of packages in the various RHEL personalities, with
> conspicuous lack of success. How anyone can make decisions about it
> without knowing exactly what is in it is beyond me.

However, you can see a list of its SRPMs here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/redhat/enterprise/3/en/os/i386/SRPMS/
and presumably on other mirrors.

it includes rh-postgresql-7.3.4-8.src.rpm (14.9Mb) and
mysql-3.23.58-1.src.rpm (11.5 Mb)

cheers

andrew

On Wednesday 12 November 2003 08:57 am, Robert Treat wrote:
> I haven't seen any discussion on the topic, so thought I might start
> one. We currently provide rpms for Red Hat 7.x, 8.x, and 9, and I'm
> assuming that we'll have rpms for all of those for 7.4 once release time
> rolls around. However, given that Red Hat is dropping support for 7.x
> and 8.x version on Jan 1st, and Red Hat 9 next April, do the current rpm
> builders forsee any issues with providing rpms for those platforms in
> the future?

The biggest issue is going to be 'will it build' on those releases. The tcl
version deal (with tcl prior to 8.1) will prevent building on Red Hat 6.2
(which we have tried to support, to varying degrees). I am following the
Fedora Legacy project; they purpose to support as a cummunity those older RHL
releases.

My hands are somewhat tied at the present to only supporting what I actively
run. That is currently RHL 8.0 and Fedora Core 1. (not 1.0, incidentally;
there is no minor version). I am migrating to Fedora Core 1 across the
board, and will be migrating to FC 2 when it comes out (I need the 2.6
kernel's features). While I could easily install and build up a buildfarm
for the others, if I'm not actively using it bitrot is more likely to set in.
But as part of Fedora Legacy I may be doing this anyway. Depends on the
business case I can make for it at PARI.

Frankly, supporting the older stuff is a real pain, primarily because people
expect an rpm -Uvh to work in a sane manner, which it currently does not do.
That, BTW, is why there haven't been any RPMs of 7.4 yet: I plan on having a
migration strategy in place first, although if I can't get it working right
by final I may just provide the same sort of RPM as prior. The idea is to
have 7.2.4 and 7.3.[45] RPMs with the migration strategy built in
concurrently to the 7.4 RPMs -- this way, the user can update to the same
major version first, then _install_ (NOT upgrade) the 7.4 RPM on top. This
works with the linux kernel now; it shouldn't be too hard to make it work
with postgresql.

> Also (and maybe someone from Red Hat can weigh in here) are there any
> plans from Red Hat to release RHEL rpms for postgresql in the future,
> and/or plans to make sure the community rpm builders would have access
> to those platforms in order to build rpms against them?

The RHEL3 beta, taroon, had the rh-postgresql rpms, including the server
packages.

I am also intrigued by the community-driven rhel-rebuild and cAosity projects.
If those stay close to the 'official' thing from Red Hat, then a postgresql
rpm built there should run on real RHEL.

Having said that, I plan on budgeting for a copy of RHEL WS. I can build
there.

I have had pretty good results with my volunteer team thus far; I hope that
continues.

What I do want to ask for, though, is a little patience if the 7.4 release
happens with no RPMs concurrently released. I do my best; but I have a job
to do. That job is currently very busy.
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Lamar Owen wrote:

> The biggest issue is going to be 'will it build' on those releases.
> The tcl version deal (with tcl prior to 8.1)

Tom applied a patch so that the build will continue to work on 8.0.x ...
or is this some other issue?

On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 23:44, Lamar Owen wrote:
> My hands are somewhat tied at the present to only supporting what I actively
> run. That is currently RHL 8.0 and Fedora Core 1. (not 1.0, incidentally;
> there is no minor version).

Have you tried mach? http://thomas.apestaart.org/projects/mach/

I know it is used successfully by several 3rd party rpm packaging sites
such as freshrpms.net. Also, it's very easy to setup.

>From the release notes:

WHAT IS IT
----------
mach allows you to set up clean roots from scratch for any distribution
or distribution variation supported.

This clean build root can be used to run jailed services, create disk
images, or build clean packages.

mach can currently set up roots for the following distributions:
- Red Hat 7.0 (basic, updated, FreshRPMS)
- Red Hat 7.1 (basic, updated, FreshRPMS)
- Red Hat 7.2 (basic, updated, FreshRPMS, JPackage)
- Red Hat 7.3 (basic, updated, FreshRPMS, JPackage)
- Red Hat 8.0 (basic, updated, Fedora, JPackage, GStreamer, FreshRPMS)
- Red Hat 9 (basic, updated, Fedora, JPackage, GStreamer, FreshRPMS)
- Fedora Core 0.94 (basic, updated)
- Fedora Core 0.95 (basic, updated)
- SuSE 8.1/8.2
- Yellowdog Linux 2.3 (basic, updated, FreshRPMS)
- Yellowdog Linux 3.0 (basic, updated, FreshRPMS)
- Dave/Dina oven/fridge

On Wednesday 12 November 2003 11:51 pm, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > The biggest issue is going to be 'will it build' on those releases.
> > The tcl version deal (with tcl prior to 8.1)

> Tom applied a patch so that the build will continue to work on 8.0.x ...
> or is this some other issue?

Oh, did that patch get applied? I saw it float by the list, but didn't know
what the disposition was (since I don't follow -committers).
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu

On Thursday 13 November 2003 12:09 am, Matthew T. O'Connor wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 23:44, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > My hands are somewhat tied at the present to only supporting what I
> > actively run. That is currently RHL 8.0 and Fedora Core 1. (not 1.0,
> > incidentally; there is no minor version).

> Have you tried mach? http://thomas.apestaart.org/projects/mach/

> I know it is used successfully by several 3rd party rpm packaging sites
> such as freshrpms.net. Also, it's very easy to setup.

Yes, I am familiar with mach.

It's not for lack of hardware, or even disk space. It is simply that I cannot
in a clear conscience support distributions I don't actively run (I forgot
one distribution I actively run, and that's Aurora SPARC Linux (currently at
1.0, which is roughly equivalent to Red Hat Linux 7.3)).

So even if I did have a box running, say, RHL 7.2, for the express purpose of
building RPMs, I would be uncomfortable supporting this since I no longer use
RHL 7.2 actively.

I had in the past thought I would do so, but then people expected more than I
could deliver. And so the current situation is that people who actively use
older dists build it and support it for those dists.
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu

On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Lamar Owen wrote:

> On Wednesday 12 November 2003 11:51 pm, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> > On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > > The biggest issue is going to be 'will it build' on those releases.
> > > The tcl version deal (with tcl prior to 8.1)
>
> > Tom applied a patch so that the build will continue to work on 8.0.x ...
> > or is this some other issue?
>
> Oh, did that patch get applied? I saw it float by the list, but didn't know
> what the disposition was (since I don't follow -committers).

Yup, I even mentioned it when I sent out the announcement to -announce and
-general :)

Lamar Owen <lowen(at)pari(dot)edu> writes:
> The biggest issue is going to be 'will it build' on those releases. The tcl
> version deal (with tcl prior to 8.1) will prevent building on Red Hat 6.2

FYI, we have put in a patch that should allow building with Tcl 8.0.* again.

regards, tom lane