perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Mark Feit <>]

Jim Nauer CWRU writes:

 

I'm building a new (internal-only) pS node, using our local baseline install of RHEL 7 instead of CentOS 7, and ran into an interesting dependency error:

 

--> Finished Dependency Resolution

Error: Package: pscheduler-server-1.1.6-2.el7.noarch (perfSONAR)

           Requires: python-flask

 

Checking on one of our "netintall" (CentOS 7) versions of pS, I can see that:

 

1. python-flask v. 0.10 was installed from the CentOS "extras" repository

 

That is what should be installed.  Base + Extras + EPEL is what’s configured on CentOS (which we support); you’ll need to configure the equivalent for RHEL (which we don’t).

 

2) but there is ALSO a package called "python-Flask" (note the capital 'F') in the perfSONAR repository which is NOT installed (but is a slightly newer version, 0.11 vs. 0.10 in both CentOS & RHEL 7 "Extras" repos).

 

Is is possible that the dependencies for pscheduler-server-1.1.6-2.el7.noarch were mis-typed and should be "python-Flask" with a capital F, or that the "python-Flask" RPM in the perfSONAR repository should have been named "python-flask" so that it would override the older but same-name package in the CentOS repository?

 

That’s a holdover from 2016 (development and beta) when the ugly train stopped at our station and we had no choice but to board it.

The backstory:

There are several things we package ourselves because they aren’t available in any of the standard repos.  Development and beta of pScheduler was primarily on CentOS 6, which put Flask into that category.  It was packaged as big-F Flask in accordance with the naming guidelines for Fedora, which feed RHEL and CentOS and defer to the original author’s preference.  Fedora went against its own recommendations and packaged it as little-F Flask for what would become EL7, throwing a wrench into the works for that release.

We ended up renaming our build of Flask for CentOS 6 to little-F for consistency across that and CentOS 7.  Because we can’t direct that a package be uninstalled during an upgrade and didn’t want to ask our CentOS 7 beta users to do fresh installs, the big-F package was “upgraded” to one with a higher version number with no files.  This cleared the way for little-F Flask to be installed without RPM choking because of file conflicts between packages (both installed the same set of files).

Nothing released with perfSONAR 4.0 requires the big-F package, so the only hosts that should have it are those that had a beta installation of pScheduler.

--Mark