[oi-dev] About package building under the Illumos umbrella

[Guido Berhoerster]

* Alasdair Lumsden <alasdairrr at gmail.com> [2011-09-03 23:22]:
> As I mentioned, JDS is a problem, and thats because often what is in
> the JDS repo is broken and does not build without hours of
> patching/fixing, and also because it ships SVR4 packages still.
> 
> pkgbuild has been enhanced to support IPS, but JDS doesn't build
> with that. I believe Guido Berhoerster is working on a plan here.

As Alan pointed out that's not right, b151 cannot be build with
it but there have been fixes to the specfiles which allow
building packages directly with the ips2 branch from pkgbuild CVS
and make the currently insane way of building obsolete.

> If there is enough community support and people working on
> maintaining packages, we can potentially look at converting some, or
> even all of JDS to oi-build format. Andrzej Szeszo has been working
> in his spare time to convert JDS packages, and has (I believe) done
> over 15 so far. He is keeping this work private for the time being
> however but perhaps he would be willing to share it.
> 
> It definitely makes sense for us to pull common software like
> Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin and others into oi-build, because we as
> a project will want to maintain these and keep them newer than
> Oracle does.

Maintaining Firefox and Thunderbird is probably a full time job
and I don't think we have anyone in the community with the time
and skills to take care of that, so I think the best we can do is
to take the latest from JDS head (the regularly posted contrib
builds ar enot production quality) which is relatively up-to-date
anyway.

One thing that I'm interested in solving is the ability to
automatically rebuild packges and their dependencies in a clean
build environment similar to the juicer backend.
-- 
Guido Berhoerster