perfsonar development work

[Guilherme Fernandes <>]

Gijs Molenaar wrote:
> 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.
You're right, this was the simpler and direct way to do it, we were 
first aiming on having it working and tested (to validate the 
installation of perfSONAR by packages for all the services). The package 
builder is meant as a helper script to facilitate building, being able 
to build and install the package in the same machine wasn't a 
requirement at the time I wrote it. But having a fakeroot option is a 
very good suggestion (specially since you wont need to do it with the 
user perfsonar and have the /home/perfsonar directory fixed).

If you do write the procedure let me know, I'll try to look into this 
anyways when I get the chance.

> - 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.
This is fixed in the new version of the package_maker script.
> - 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.
Yes, it is done by the script (as a command in the package installation 
process). The symlink is done basically with:

ln -fns /home/perfsonar/webapps/$serviceName-$serviceVersion 
/home/perfsonar/webapps/$serviceName
> 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?*
These were the first rpms created to be used by the developers/testers. 
There is already a debian tomcat package and the exist deb should be 
ready soon.

We will update the repository with the latest version of the packages.

Guilherme
> Thanks,
>
>
> - gijs