perfsonar development work

[Gijs Molenaar <>]

Frederic LOUI wrote:
> The first step in providing PerfSONAR package is to demonstrate how 
> RPM (and in general PAKAGING) could ease
> PerfSONAR deployment because we had a lot of complaint from the 
> end-user having spent 3 days for perfsonar installation.
yes, you already made the installation procedure _much_ more easier. 
Thank you :)
> Anyway, thanks for your suggestion. I tried to think about a quick 
> solution in order to "ease" the deployment (developer+release 
> management team+end user) for everyone.
> But this is definitly a good point that we should discuss with the 
> developers and the release management team during the ZAGREB meeting.
> The packages building process can be improved and we welcome all 
> people having a strong UNIX background.
>
> If it is possible from your side (Guilherme and Gijs) , would it be 
> possible for you to build the RRD-MA packages using tomcat part of the 
> distribution:
> * Fedora / rpm
> * For UBUNTU (gutsy for example)/ deb
> * FreeBSD / pkg
>
> Observe and write a small feedback document regarding how to build 
> PerfSONAR packages using the native TOMCAT distribution ?
Our Flow SA MA service is working quite good now, and I want to get some 
people testing the software, this is why I'm looking into building RPM's 
for our service. Our service is much simpler than the RRD-MA (only one 
WAR, pure java+one shell script), so it should be much easier to build 
system independent packages for the platforms. First I want to finish 
our own release and do it the current RPM way, after this I will look 
into creating RPM's/DEB packages that use the distributions way of 
packaging. With this gained knowledge I can try to build some proper 
RRD-MA packages. There are Tomcat example packages in the 
fedora/ubuntu/debian/centos repositories, so we can use these as examples.

Next to that, Maybe not the right pace to address this but I don't know where 
to do it else, fernandes; I noticed that the current RPM build scripts has 
some strange bugs/design flaws:

- other packages installed in /home/perfsonar/webapps will also be put 
into the RPM you create
- Generating the packages from /home/perfsonar/webapps is a bad idea if 
this is also the installation path. I can't deploy my generated package 
now on the same machine, I need to (re)move the manually installed 
service before. I'm new to RPM building, but I've read that a sort of 
fakeroot option is available. Also, specifying owner  of the files can 
be done at package time. I think it is a way better idea to modify the 
script so you can build the RPM's with any user from any location. I'll 
try to do this manually and write out a procedure.
- I noticed that the RPM automatically creates a server.xml entry. This 
is nice, but when I remove the package (rpm -e), the entry isn't removed.
- The flow-rrd-ma is installed in 
/home/perfsonar/geant2_java-ma-x86-32-3.0rc4 and that a symlink is 
created/installed /home/perfsonar/geant2_java-ma-x86-32. Is this done by 
the installation script? If so, how? I want this option too so I can 
configure my default paths in my service version independent.

Can't think of any more now.

I found RPM packages in *http://downloads.perfsonar.eu/dependencies/, 
this is the place to find the latest 'official' RPM's? Are there also 
DEB's of tomcat and exist?*

Thanks,


- gijs