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As everyone else is introducing themselves I
thought I'd pop my head up.
I've been involved with the GDP and heard the first
rumblings from Greg about doing this, expressed what a good idea I thought it
was to him and promptly forgot about it until he mentioned that he had mailed a
RFC to gnome-hackers.
I too am learning slowly (mostly from Greg) about
building rpm's and have spent some time in trying to get a semi-automated
building process going working with a package called gbuild, which is mostly
just a bunch of shell and perl scripts to automate grabbing the latest CVS of a
product and making rpm's out of them. It needs a bit of TLC but mostly does a
fairly good job at what it does. I have contacted the author of this package who
indicated he had no time to update it and encouraged me to go ahead and make
changes if needed. This package I believe is unique in that it allows people
compiling on single machines to readily download and make rpm's from CVS (apart
from getting it to actually work that is).
The other solution I looked at for automated builds
is tinderbox. It is far more ambitious in that it lets you grab your CVS code
and test if it actually compiles successfully then send the results to a
webserver. It seemed to me to be non-trivial to setup and required several
servers to work correctly (I could be wrong about this) so once I discovered
that I dropped it and went back to getting gbuild to work. It also AFAIK didnt
make rpm's in an automated way.
The one thing I thought of in the discussions so
far is how best we can involve people in this. For example, say I'm Joe Blow and
I have a fast computer and willpower but not really much of an idea of how to
contribute. (We get people like this often in the GDP) I think we should take a
similar approach to the GDP in having on the webpages suggested packages to have
installed, and a guide to how to get a 'hello, world' type tarball/spec file to
rpm building stage. We could also put some references to rpm.org, debian, etc
for more reading and encourage people to start with something small to get them
encouraged to continue helping.
Well thats my initial thoughts, I'm glad to see
this happening and am looking forward to contributing
Chris (Wilddev)
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