perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Mark Feit <>]

Fleming, Andy writes:

 

Forgive me if I missed something in GitHub or something.  I know when
the announcement of the 5.0 beta packages for CentOS 7 were announced
at the end of May, the announcement said, "Packages for EL8-based OSes,
Debian and Ubuntu will be provided prior to final release." 

 

That was the marketing department.  Never trust those guys.  :-)

 

The short version is that we’re a little behind on where we wanted to be with EL8, but we are into the home stretch.

 

The hold-up has been a side effect of the events surrounding RedHat’s discontinuation of CentOS 8 and our desire not to have our primary development environment yanked out from under us again.  We’ve re-thought several aspects of development and build in an effort to make Debian a first-class environment instead of treating it as a port like we have in the past.  A by-product of that re-think is a new build system called Unibuild (https://github.com/perfsonar/unibuild) that makes supporting multiple versions of the EL and Debian families a lot easier.  Since no good deed goes unpunished, we’ve had to do a lot of tedious, manual work to rearrange the packaging of everything in perfSONAR to fit its model and re-test all of it everywhere (including EL8) to make sure we didn’t break anything.

 

Beta started early with EL7 because the code base is stable, isn’t impacted much at all by the packaging changes and can be built using the old method while we finish shifting everything to Unibuild.

 

The payoff for these delays is that we’ll be able to accelerate support for EL9 and newer Debian/Ubuntu flavors.  pScheduler is the benchmark for packaging complexity in perfSONAR and I’ve had what should be a final build running in EL9 for several weeks.  There are no solid plans for releasing that yet, but it will be a topic in the coming months.  We very much want to get caught up to current and stay that way.

 

--Mark