On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 02:02:13PM +0200, Pascal Bleser wrote:

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Carl Hartung wrote:

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On Monday 12 September 2005 07:38, Redhat Admin wrote:

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What I'd like to know is, are there any such equivalent repos for suse 9.3 ... There are a lot of great '3rd party' package maintainers for SUSE, too. MPlayer etc. and many more can be found here: http://packman.links2linux.com/

That's http://packman.links2linux.org

And here's another one: http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/

This is getting very confusing. I personally like the Yast Repositories better an easier to use: http://www.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories How are these related? Is the above the same as Guru, or are there differences? In apt there are other suser-* things as well. Can they be used as external Yast repositories or not? I will be re-writing http://www.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories to make it more uniform, especially the External ones. houghi -- Quote correct (NL) http://www.briachons.org/art/quote/ Zitiere richtig (DE) http://www.afaik.de/usenet/faq/zitieren Quote correctly (EN) http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Carl Hartung wrote:

On Monday 12 September 2005 08:37, houghi wrote: <snip>

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This is getting very confusing. I personally like the Yast Repositories better an easier to use: http://www.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories

It /is/ confusing to me sometimes, too, so don't feel bad. The way I've organized it in my head and on on my systems is YaST handles "official" SUSE packages, including the unsupported supplementary sources and security updates, and I use apt/synaptic to handle everything else.

Ok, as this topic is poping up quite often, let me give some background on all that. YaST2 installs packages from YaST2 metadata repositories. It's as simple as that ;) Those are called "installation sources" in the YaST2 jargon. That "metadata" comprises data for every package that's provided, such as: - - package name, version and release number, what architecture - - summary and description - - dependencies to other packages - - what it provides to other packages etc... Novell provides installation sources for 10.0: http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/mirrors/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS-RC1... http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/mirrors/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS-RC1... (those are from the uni-erlangen mirror, the primary source being ftp.gwdg.de) Those are the "official", supported installation sources for SUSE Linux, that include the packages that are shipped within the SUSE Linux distribution (except for the "inst-source-java" installation source: it includes packages that are not shipped on the SUSE Linux OSS distribution, because they're not OpenSource, but AFAIK installation of those is also supported by Novell). The other installation sources are commonly referred to as "3rd party repositories", where "3rd party" means: not made nor maintained nor supported by Novell. Two examples of these: Packman and my site ("guru") (and there are a few others, just to lazy to put them all in here ;)). We 3rd party repository maintainers have several options on how to "offer" our packages to everyone's use: - - http/ftp download: Download the files yourself, and install them e.g. with the rpm command-line ("rpm -i ..."). We all have that but it's not the best option as you have to solve the dependency issues yourself. - - YaST2 repository metadata: SUSE includes a few scripts to generate and maintain it (although it's not the simplest metadata format to handle, let's hope for/make better tools). - - APT repository metadata: To be used by the RPM port of APT (commonly referred to as "apt4rpm" although that's not correct: "apt4rpm" is the server-side package that includes the tools to generate the repository metadata - the APT client (used to install packages) is "apt" or "apt-get"). - - YUM repository metadata: YUM is a tool similar to APT that has originally been written by Yellow Dog Linux (a distro specialized on PPC) and which has been adopted by the Fedora Core project as their primary package installation frontend. - - RedCarpet repository metadata: Red Carpet is a package management frontend developed by Ximian (now Novell as they have been bought by the latter). All of these package installation frontends have different repository metadata formats, which means that if I, as a 3rd party repository manager, want to give the users the choice of the frontend they want to use, I have to generate the metadata for all of them. And that's what part of us actually do (except for YUM). Note that for the package repositories hosted at ftp.gwdg.de (and that's most of them), Eberhart Moenke does the hard work as he is generating the metadata over there. For YaST2 and RedCarpet, we are generating it ourselves (at least the Packman team and I do so). BTW, I call these (yast2, apt, yum, red carpet) "frontends" because that's what they are. Not in a sense of being GUIs(*) or CLIs(**), but because in the end, they all use RPM to actually install (or remove, or upgrade) the packages. (*) Graphical User Interface (**) Command-Line Interface The benefit of that approach is that never mind which frontend you use, or even if you mix them, it all works just fine because RPM is doing the low-level stuff for all of them. You don't have separate package databases, it's all RPM. Note that with "mix", I mean once installing a package with "rpm -i", then with "apt-get" (or it's GUI "synaptic"), the next one with YaST2 (or y2pmsh), and eventually the other one with Red Carpet (or its CLI frontend "rug"). It all works. So, in the end, it's a matter of choosing the frontend you prefer. And, obviously, if you have 3rd party package repositories that you like to use, make sure you choose a frontend those repositories have metadata for. ...

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How are these related? Is the above the same as Guru, or are there differences?

It's the URL to the YaST2 metadata ("installation source") but it's the same list of packages than if you were using http+rpm from http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser, or apt-get, or Red Carpet. It's a single set of packages but with various metadata formats for the various RPM frontends. Unfortunately they don't all share the same metadata format, but that's how things are (and they're extremely unlikely to change ;)).

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In apt there are other suser-* things as well. Can they be used as external Yast repositories or not?

No, not those, because no YaST2 metadata is provided for/by them. They're only available through APT, because Eberhart Moenkeberg is such a nice guy and he spends much time into having the APT metadata generated on ftp.gwdg.de (most of you don't know yet what Ebarhart is doing for you ;)). I know he and Richard Bos are also working on providing YUM metadata, but AFAIC it's not ready yet and as Eberhart is also the maintainer of the primary openSUSE mirror (ftp.gwdg.de), he understandably has other priorities at the moment ;)) BTW, Richard Bos also deserves big kudos here, as he is maintaining the APT RPM port SUSE Linux packages. He'll have to bother a lot less with that now, as Novell has finally accepted to include the apt and apt4rpm packages into 10.0 (thanks!). Note that yum is included in 10.0 as well.

I can't answer this because I still "cherry pick" rpms at Guru's site and install them manually. I do this for most of the "suser-" sources. There are a lot of warnings in the apt documentation and scripts about avoiding "experimental" and "development" level packages which, purportedly, are maintained in several of the 'suser-' sources; warnings to the effect that average non-programmer / non-tinkerer users ought not include those sources lest they end up 'breaking' their systems.

Well, there are a few issues we as 3rd party packagers have to solve. For a short summary of a part of those, read the bottom of one of my previous postings on this list: http://lists.opensuse.org/archive/opensuse/2005-Sep/0285.html

YaST and apt are two interfaces into the same package management system (rpm),

Correct.

but I think (could be wrong) the staging of the packages, server-side, is different between the two. I think YaST recognizes and will use a YaST source and, likewise, apt it's own repositories, but I don't think the two are seamlessly interchangeable.

Exactly. They're not interchangeable. YaST2 is also able to use YUM repository metadata since 10.0, so that might be an option to simplify the job of the 3rd party repository providers. I hope all of this helps understanding. cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ _\_v ===> FOSDEM 2006 -- February 2006 in Brussels <=== -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDJZCfr3NMWliFcXcRAjQ6AKC0RTpadiWH+522SX3ObjYuKgkrAwCfWEb/ ZExHK5cxOyXo7Td46fiKRpk= =KScB -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 04:28:48PM +0200, Pascal Bleser wrote: <snip excelent explanation>

I hope all of this helps understanding.

very much so. Much kudo's to all those third party packagers. One more question. Packman and Guru seem to do a lot of overlapping work. It looks as if a lot of packages are made on both. Would it not be easier to devide the tasks so both get more time to do other things? Or is that already happening? houghi -- Quote correct (NL) http://www.briachons.org/art/quote/ Zitiere richtig (DE) http://www.afaik.de/usenet/faq/zitieren Quote correctly (EN) http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 05:57:41PM +0200, Pascal Bleser wrote:

We don't have that many overlapping packages, but we do have a few indeed.

But actually I'm going to join the Packman team, so my packages will be hosted over there and we'll sort out the conflicts and duplicate packages.

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Or is that already happening?

Yes, behind the scenes ;)

Awesome. :-) houghi -- Quote correct (NL) http://www.briachons.org/art/quote/ Zitiere richtig (DE) http://www.afaik.de/usenet/faq/zitieren Quote correctly (EN) http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

I dont know what Novell/SuSE policies on updating SLES with untested & external packages is but I doubt they'd like users doing that & then saying SLES crashes now that the whole system has been updated to the latest openSuSE beta realease kernel. Okay Im overdoing it .. but I very much doubt it. or does Redhat have something along that line for Redhat Advanced Server ? --- Cameron Seader wrote:

It would be nice to see the possability of YUM for SLES.

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On Mon, 12 Sep 2005, Cameron Seader wrote:

What i mean by this is that sles does not have a very good cli tool that can be used to update a server with, unless you use YOU or buy ZLM. YUM could be used as a cli interface to this. I have used online_update, but it lacks quite a bit.

Unfortunately we don't have y2pmsh on SLES yet, but I guess it will be in SLES10. (y2pmsh = Shell interface for the YaST2 packagemanager) Regards Christoph

On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 09:51:12AM -0400, Carl Hartung wrote:

On Monday 12 September 2005 08:37, houghi wrote: <snip>

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This is getting very confusing. I personally like the Yast Repositories better an easier to use: http://www.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories

Hi Houghi,

It /is/ confusing to me sometimes, too, so don't feel bad. The way I've organized it in my head and on on my systems is YaST handles "official" SUSE packages, including the unsupported supplementary sources and security updates, and I use apt/synaptic to handle everything else.

I twice tried apt and killed my system, so I won't use it, unless I have to.

This wasn't planned, it was just a natural progression from YaST (pre-installed, of course) to later integrating apt into my routine.

The reason people use apt is because they were told that it was the easiest way. I have now found out that one tool (Yast) can do the same stuff that apt did. There just was not enough emphasis on the use of extra repositories, or even the use of repositories at all. Once you know how to add repositories, it is (at least for a beginner) the easiest way to go. Yast -> Change Source -> Add To know what to add, just look on the URL below.

I'll be following your progress and will probably be learning from you :-) Thanks for the effort!

http://www.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories The first part is done. Hope you like it. houghi -- Quote correct (NL) http://www.briachons.org/art/quote/ Zitiere richtig (DE) http://www.afaik.de/usenet/faq/zitieren Quote correctly (EN) http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

http://www.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories The first part is done. Hope you like it.

Great work, thanks ! But just a proposition, do you think that the directories should be sorted from the most recent (10.0), to the oldest (7.x) ?

It is a WiKi page, so by all means change it. :-) I just asked your permission, I had the intention to do it. Thank you very much !

That's http://packman.links2linux.org And here's another one: http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/

...and also http://usr-local-bin.org/rpms :) -- James Ogley james@usr-local-bin.org GNOME for SuSE: http://usr-local-bin.org/rpms Make Poverty History: http://makepovertyhistory.org

On Mon, 12 Sep 2005, houghi wrote:

On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 06:51:38PM +0100, James Ogley wrote:

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That's http://packman.links2linux.org And here's another one: http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/

...and also http://usr-local-bin.org/rpms :)

Do you plan on converting that to Yast repo's as well, or will that stay apt-only?

It's just a matter of calling "createrepo /dir/to/rpms/" to turn them into YUM repos. For 10.0 those would work out of the box with YaST or yum. If you need yum packages for older SUSE releases, I can build them and put them into my people dir on ftp.suse.com... Regards Christoph

On Mon, 12 Sep 2005, houghi wrote:

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If you need yum packages for older SUSE releases, I can build them and put them into my people dir on ftp.suse.com...

Not me personally and ftp.suse.com is so slow, I sometimes think it is a server at somebodies home behind an ISDN link. :-)

s/ftp.suse.com/$mirror of ftp.suse.com/ ;) Regards Christoph

Hi, On Mon, 12 Sep 2005, James Ogley wrote:

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It's just a matter of calling "createrepo /dir/to/rpms/" to turn them into YUM repos. For 10.0 those would work out of the box with YaST or yum.

That'd be one for Eberhard I would think, it is his server after all ;)

ISTR this was trialed at one point[1]

[1] See http://rubberturnip.org.uk/index.cgi/2005/08/06

first aspect: the yum support within apt4rpm/aptate is discarded currently (needs investigation, current results are not sufficient). To make it fully clear: "APT can generate YUM repositories quite easily" was a hope only, in fact it is wrong, false, no, not yet, what ever you need to understand "nope". second aspect: all my "suser-people" should try to do as much as possible of the "repository generating" steps at home in order to assure a just-in-time repository appearence as much as possible. I will surely not get a new server this year like I think I need (quad Opteron with 32 GB RAM, 15 TEuro money at least), so we have to care that the current server(s) will stay able to fulfill their tasks within time. ftp.gwdg.de alone already lacks this requirement these days, so I have delegated the every-4-hours-APT-refresh to a second server. I really can't extend this service further, and in fact it is already too much hassle under professional aspects. Cheers -e -- Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke@gwdg.de, em@kki.org)

On Tuesday 13 September 2005 01:56, Carl Hartung wrote:

It's probably none of my business, and you can tell me that without offending me, but how in the world does this amount of infrastructure get /paid/ for in the first place? All the bandwidth? The hardware? Eberhard's Rolls Royce? :-) I've never had even a glimpse of what the various funding mechanism(s) are.

What if we had a "New server gwdg.de for Eberhard" fund-raiser? Tacky? Against the rules? Against the law? Ever tried?

I'd really appreciate having this gap in my understanding filled in...

www.gwdg.de/index_us.html It's not exactly something based in somebody's basement

Hi, On Mon, 12 Sep 2005, Carl Hartung wrote:

On Monday 12 September 2005 19:42, Eberhard Moenkeberg wrote:

<snip>

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I will surely not get a new server this year like I think I need (quad Opteron with 32 GB RAM, 15 TEuro money at least), so we have to care that the current server(s) will stay able to fulfill their tasks within time.

ftp.gwdg.de alone already lacks this requirement these days, so I have delegated the every-4-hours-APT-refresh to a second server. I really can't extend this service further, and in fact it is already too much hassle under professional aspects.

Cheers -e

It's probably none of my business, and you can tell me that without offending me, but how in the world does this amount of infrastructure get /paid/ for in the first place? All the bandwidth? The hardware? Eberhard's Rolls Royce? :-) I've never had even a glimpse of what the various funding mechanism(s) are.

ftp.gwdg.de has as a primary role: serving the gwdg.de net (University of Goettingen plus the local Max-Planck-Institutes plus - more and more the last time - all other Max-Planck-Institutes in Germany). The secondary role is to serve for the DFN network (www.dfn.de) as a server for SUSE-Linux. We were free to decide this "inside GWDG", because the payment policy of the DFN (our provider, the german scientific network) is VERY VERY fair (one of my former chiefs had influenced it this way): we are paying for INCOMING traffic, but all OUTGOING traffic is considered a "service to the DFN community" and by this free of cost.

What if we had a "New server gwdg.de for Eberhard" fund-raiser? Tacky? Against the rules? Against the law? Ever tried?

SUSE/Novell is currently investigating, but you may be right that we will never achieve it. First hurdles are at novell.com (U.S. laws,). Second hurdles at gwdg.de (local german laws).

I'd really appreciate having this gap in my understanding filled in...

"Man" is the glue (me, I guess). I like to assure that we in practice have no real gap. Cheers -e -- Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke@gwdg.de, em@kki.org)

On Tue, 13 Sep 2005, Eberhard Moenkeberg wrote:

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It's just a matter of calling "createrepo /dir/to/rpms/" to turn them into YUM repos. For 10.0 those would work out of the box with YaST or yum.

That'd be one for Eberhard I would think, it is his server after all ;)

ISTR this was trialed at one point[1]

[1] See http://rubberturnip.org.uk/index.cgi/2005/08/06

first aspect: the yum support within apt4rpm/aptate is discarded currently (needs investigation, current results are not sufficient). To make it fully clear: "APT can generate YUM repositories quite easily" was a hope only, in fact it is wrong, false, no, not yet, what ever you need to understand "nope".

apt4rpm just calls createrepo. I wonder what's going wrong there... can you elaborate on that?

second aspect: all my "suser-people" should try to do as much as possible of the "repository generating" steps at home in order to assure a just-in-time repository appearence as much as possible.

Agreed. Regards Christoph