ovirt-release package

[Steve Gordon]

Hi all,

In last week's sync up meeting we again discussed the possibility of creating an RPM to deliver the yum repository file (which I have had a crack at providing, but more on that in a moment). A few questions came up which I'd like to also put to the list with my own thoughts, hopefully others can provide theirs.

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Q: Why provide an RPM for this? The user still has to download the RPM to install it!
A: The benefit of providing the repository file wrapped in an RPM as I see it is that the user only has to manually download the RPM once, if (more likely when in my opinion) we need to change the repo file and/or add GPG keys etc they pick up the updated ovirt-release RPM up via yum update. If we don't provide it in an RPM then they will have to manually wget the updated repo file, and keys if applicable, and we would need a way to communicate to users that it was in fact necessary to do this.

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Q: Would we need to get this RPM into Fedora?
A: No, this repo file (and RPM) is for users wishing to track releases and nightly builds as they are put up by the oVirt Project. As I understand it the various oVirt components are not in any way tied to a particular distributions release schedule. As such it seems probable that there will be times when the release available at ovirt.org is more up to date than the version that is packaged in Fedora, obviously with nightly builds this will almost always be the case. 

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Q: What does the repo file actually look like?
A: There are two variations at the moment, the one initially linked from the wiki:

http://www.ovirt.org/releases/nightly/fedora/16/ovirt-engine.repo 

And one that Karsten I think had been working on as a result of the previous meeting:

http://ovirt.org/wiki/Yum_repo_file

The later is probably closer to what we need long term, in particular supporting both nightly and stable releases and using variables for the release version and architecture. At the moment however the repository doesn't support this level of granularity as we seem to have lumped x86_64 and noarch packages in the same directory? Is this something we intend to change long term? Where are we planning to place SRPMs? 

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Q: Where would this RPM exist in the repository? Where would the spec file live?
A: This was the open question that was posed at the last meeting and probably the bit I need help with. I created a spec file based on the one used for fedora-release which I put on the wiki page for want of a better place:

http://www.ovirt.org/wiki/Yum_repo_file#Spec_File

To get the benefits I talked about earlier in this message the resultant RPM really needs to both:
1) Exist in the repository itself so that once it has installed itself users get updates to it.
2) Easily discoverable, probably linked from whatever 'Get oVirt!' style page we have under Fedora.

The question really I guess is how does it get into the repository?

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What do other people think? I realise that the above could easily be construed as bike shedding but I think that even though these are relatively simple matters it is important to flesh them out now particularly if we are looking to make a "release" (whatever that entails) in the near future.

-Steve