gnucash files for SuSE 8.1 on sf

Chris Lyttle chris at wilddev.net
Sam Feb 15 14:52:00 CST 2003


On Fri, 2003-02-14 at 02:28, Soeren Mindorf wrote:
> Hi Chris,
> 
> I have talked to Christian Stimming how can I release my rpm-packages 
> from gnucash for SuSE 8.1, he told me you can help.
> 
> I have build the following packages for SuSE 8.1 with hbci support:
> 
> - gnucash 1.7.8
> - gnucash 1.8.0
> - gnucash 1.8.1
> - g-wrap-1.3.4
> - openhbci-sm-0.9.5
> 
> Can I upload this files to sf?
> Christian thinks that is a good idear when you add me as developer in sf 
> and give me dir permissions that I can release my files.
> 

I'm widening this to the general GnuCash community because it brings up
some questions that probably should be answered as we go ahead with
stable releases and even when we decide to start doing unstable ones
again.

I have been releasing RedHat RPM's mainly because that's what I'm using
here. I've been considering changing my workstation to Gentoo. I could
still do RH releases by booting to another disk or using VMware. The
questions that have come up lately have been about packaging for other
distro's, mainly debian, mandrake and suse.

My normal release process up till now with the unstable series was just
to make sure the tarballs passed make distcheck on RH 7.3 then to build
RH rpms for 7.x and 8.x. As this needed to be done pretty quickly due to
a release every 2 weeks, I didn't have time to consult people building
on other distro's to see if things worked ok there.

For the stable series releases, we now have the opportunity to slow down
the release process so people who wish to contribute packages built for
other distro's can test and get the package's done for release.

The first thing that comes up with this is that the gnucash.org ftp site
is not reachable with an ftp client, only with a web browser or ssh.
This is mainly for Linas as the owner of that server, how would you like
to have it so people contributing packages for other distro's can upload
it to gnucash.org? We have currently also some extra packages for
gnucash, libofx, openhbci and g-wrap mainly. Do we want to store distro
specific packages of these also on the ftp server and if so what process
do we use to validate the packages will work and upload them to the
server? (BTW the sourceforge site is just a mirror for packages, what we
decide here would also mean uploading to sf as well for just the gnucash
packages)

Secondly, the release process itself. I would prefer, as the one doing
the releases, to not spend lots of time in getting packages from people
who are contributing and making sure they get to the right place on the
server. I would like to have it that one person takes responsibility to
make sure the package works for each distro that wants to put packages
on the gnucash.org servers. This would involve not only testing the
package before you put it on the server, but also working on resolving
any problems with the package you release once they are on the
gnucash.org server. The package names I have been using include the
platform it was built on due to some previous confusion of what was
being installed. I would like people to use the following format;

gnucash-<release version>.<distro><distro version>.<pkg>

for eg, gnucash-1.8.1-1.RH8.0.i386.rpm

My suggestion for the co-ordination of releases is as follows (all times
PST);

1) Decide on release date (a sunday evening)
2) Tag CVS with gnucash-<version>-rc (eg gnucash-1-8-1-rc)
3) Make tarball from that tag, release as a rc a week before the general
release date. 
4) People making packages build from that tarball, feeding back any
problems to the gnucash-devel list. NOTE: If the problem is major enough
that it needs testing after committing to CVS then I will delay the
release date another week to go through the release rc, test process
again.
5) The friday evening before release I will make the final tarball and
tag CVS with gnucash-<version> (eg gnucash-1-8-1).
6) I would upload the tarball to an area on the gnucash-org ftp server
that the package makers can access to get.
7) People make packages, upload them before sunday evening
8) The release is generally announced Sunday evening

As to the packages people are making, there needs to be some thought put
into how the packages are being made. As I have demonstrated with the RH
packages, it is possible to make a main gnucash package and have addon
packages for optional features like libofx, hbci and sql. At the very
least your package must only require g-wrap for users to install. If you
want to add openhbci support, for eg, you need to have a separate rpm,
deb or whatever for this. This is to minimize problems for people
installing that dont want/need those addon features. (The above packages
wouldn't be acceptable for this reason, they need openhbci to install).

Chris
-- 
RedHat Certified Engineer #807302549405490.
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