[packagers] contributing to rpmforge

[Dag Wieers]

On Mon, 11 Jun 2007, Who Knows wrote:

> I have for a long time wanted to contribute, but never really have had the
> time to get an automated build system working. Hopefully I have that
> corrected, now. After trying dar, pydar, and mach with various success, I have
> been able to work most effectively with mock. I have been using mock to
> maintain a small personal repository of packages I use on the servers I
> administer.
> 
> Recently when I upgraded my workstation to fc7 I had lots of dependencies on
> rpmforge that were not yet available for fc7, so I believe I can now build
> rpmforge packages for fc7 ( and some other fc dists ) using mock. Probably
> naively I simply started my job to build all of rpmforge from svn locally, but
> it seems ( at least for my environment ) there are many updates needed yet for
> fc7 in rpmforge. As I discover them, and overcome them, I'll post my updates
> via a diff output here, unless there is a better way/place.

Using mock is fine.


> If my build efforts can contribute please advise how I can best do this.

I think you should have SVN access :) Dries has started doing Fedora 7 
packages, so your efforts will probably be most useful to him.


> One issue I would like some guidance with is missing "Source" files. Several
> of my first build attempts failed due to missing remote source files. How is
> this issue normally reconciled? Should I report these issues? In one case the
> old version was not available, but a newer one was and it worked. In another
> case the URL was simply out of date.

It depends. If these are publically available Source files, updating the 
URL (and sending us the fix) would probably be best. If the 
Sources/Patches are not URLs, this probably means that we simply forgot to 
commit them.

Dries used to have a script that would report missing Source/Patch files. 
I think we may have to send automated mails for packagers with problems 
like these. I had been looking at repoclosure, but it reports too many 
false positives to be useful.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]