On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 9:26 PM Konstantin Boudnik <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks for reaching out, Christopher! I am not entirely sure about the > proposition. Are you proposing to harmonize the RPM packaging between what > we > provide here and what is going to Fedora/CentOS? That'd be grand, I guess. > > I would like to learn how you propose we keep the code in sync, unless you > would like to use the Bigtop specs as the upstream for your packaging > effort. > Then any changes could be up-streamed back through the usual Apache > contribution process. > > What do you think? Thanks! > Cos > > Sorry for the long response. The summary is that I'm hoping to: 1) solicit support for packaging in the other communities (especially Fedora/EPEL) from Bigtop folks with packaging experience/interests, and 2) see where we can eliminate redundancy, and create a consistent message about the differences between the available choices. Longer response follows: >From Roman's response, it sounds like there might be incentive to continue with the packaging standards established within Bigtop, because at least some vendors are derivative of those standards. I actually really like the standards in the Fedora community, which also seem to closely match what EL are doing (not counting RHSCL stuffs). I don't really know anything about Debian/Ubuntu packaging, though. Ideally, I think a long-term goal would be to try to eliminate the need for Bigtop. It'd be nice if I could just go to my preferred distribution, and install using the distro's provided package manager. However, because the Bigtop packaging standards may intentionally differ from these distros' standards, I'd like to at least make them complimentary (reduce overlap), and maybe make it clear why one might choose one set vs. another. For example, one might choose Bigtop if one wants consistent packaging regardless of the distribution one uses. Or, perhaps Bigtop adds value by providing newer packages than what are provided by stable distro releases (similar to https://ius.io/ for EL). In the short term, I'm trying to encourage some folks to help out with the Fedora and EPEL packaging. I've only taken on Hadoop in Fedora because the previous maintainer could no longer maintain it, and I needed it for Accumulo. But, I'm still lacking some expertise and time to work through outstanding issues. In particular, the Hadoop version in Fedora is only 2.4.1, so it needs to be updated. Fedora also has build requirements to support ARM architectures, so not all of the native code in Hadoop works well on ARM, and I don't have sufficient expertise in C to bring the relevant issues to the upstream Hadoop. EPEL, as a whole is still lacking most of the good packages. Presumably, that's because EL users are relying on commercial vendors, which is fine... but I'd like to open these packages to a wider audience, within EPEL, just like Bigtop is doing in Apache. Thanks.
