This is a shorthand list of items we are needing to cover for building EPEL-8 in Fedora Infrastructure for the Fiscal Year 2020.
his is a shorthand list of items we are needing to cover for building EPEL-8 in Fedora Infrastructure for the Fiscal Year 2020.
Document Details
- Status:WORKING DRAFT:
- Point of contact: Stephen Smoogen
- Implementation Schedule: 2019-06-01
- Release Date: 2019-06-01
Goals
- Make a version of EPEL available by end of March for the beta of RHEL-8.
- Version will work out tools needed to make builds possible using modules
- Version will test new compose rules for EPEL trees using a Stuff and Updates tree.
- Version will test out new compose paths
- Make a larger version of EPEL-8 available soon after the General Availability of RHEL-8
- Assume that for 8.0 that builds of modules may not be available but tested in alternate tree
- Make EPEL-8 fully modular by release of RHEL-8.1
- Test scripts to archive old releases and compose new ones at this time.
Background
With Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 Beta released, it is time to evaluating making a version of EPEL for it. As with any major RHEL release, there are major changes which affect what can and can not be done in a release. Where in RHEL-7 there were changes in the init program moving from Upstart to systemctl, this release has added modular rpm package sets which change how packages can be built.
Modules are a tool which allows one to have parallel availability of different package sets. One can set up a system and choose to have php-7.2 OR php-7.4 installed with appropriate sub-modules as needed. These are done via the dnf command which has the needed logic to work out needed dependencies and conflicts. In order for the koji system to know this, there is also the Module Build System (MBS) which interprets and keeps track of this higher level repo data. For Fedora packages and modules which are completely built within koji this is all put together, however EPEL packages are built from artifacts which koji has no idea about. These are the Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages which koji and the build systems see as outside repositories. Since these packages were not built in the Fedora Build Infrastructure, neither koji nor MBS know enough about the packages which would cause build failures at times.
In order to work around this additional tools need to be built which can ferret out the information from the RHEL metadata in order to allow modules to be both pulled into various build roots and also have additional modules built on top of those pre-existing modules.
Strategic Fit
EPEL is used by a very large number of systems around the world and is part of the lifecycle of packages moving from Fedora Linux into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem. Having Fedora packages and tools available in EPEL is seen as useful for both Fedora and Red Hat in maintenance of their userbase.
People involved
This project impacts a number of application or other projects. Here is a quick list of the different projects involved and their point of contact.
- Coordinator: Stephen Smoogen
- Impacted: Matthew Miller
- Release Engineering:
Assumptions
Additional Links
Task Breakdown
- Determine buildroot requirements
- Koji rules for el-8 hidden external build roots
- import fake modules from RHEL-8 into MBS
- determine what default packages/modules are
- determine what is in 8.0 buildroot.
- create tool which will take 8.x RHN channel and creates a 'composed' buildroot for koji to work on
- TBD
- Determine new directory layout for compose/ship
- /pub/epel/releases/8.x/Everything
- /pub/epel/releases/8.x/Modular
- /pub/epel/updates/8.x/Everything
- /pub/epel/updates/8.x/Modular
- Need to branch for EL8
- Need koji tags
- FPDC entries (is FPDC ready???)
- Discover rel-eng tasks for setup/cleanup that no one remembers
- Fix fedpkg/centpkg to understand new EPEL layout, branch names, etc
- Determine architectures to build against (s390?)
- Need to work out open communication paths with Red Hat internal teams in charge of Code Ready Linux Builder for packages..
- Need to consult Bugzilla maintainers for changes needed
- Package name
- Business rules
- Establish policies for which packages are branched into EPEL-8
- Establish policies for how modules are branched into EPEL-8
- Setup policies for package 7->8 bootstrapping (w/o review)
- Establish tool to block packages in 8.0
- See what we can move back to RHEL-7