[ovirt-users] Adding Fedora 20 Support

[Justin Brown]

Hello,

I recently came across the LWN article on oVirt 3.4
(http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/600370/dfa9cdd4f5ee0bb3/) and was
discussing the lack of Fedora 20 support with an oVirt contributor,
bkp.

It's been 4 months since I last looked at running oVirt. I use Fedora
20 on all of my infrastructure, so I was quite surprised that there is
still not support for running the engine on F20. Anyways, rather than
just complaining, I figured it would be more helpful to volunteer some
time to fix the issue.

1) I've tried looking through the oVirt bug reports to see what's
happening with Fedora 20. So far, I have identified three issues that
prevent 3.4 from working. Fedora includes sos-3, sos doesn't have
support for all ovirt plugins, and only has Wildfly instead of
JBoss-as. The full list of bugs is listed in
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1060198.

2) I was looking through the various oVirt yum repositories and
noticed that oVirt provides JBoss-AS along with tons of packages for
the el6 platform; however, for both Fedora 19 and 20, oVirt almost
entirely uses built-in packages. This seems like strange behavior
where the project has gone to great lengths to make sure oVirt works
on platforms with outdated or nonexistent packages, but won't override
or use alternates on platforms that contain overly new packages. Could
someone explain why oVirt doesn't package these for Fedora,
particularly jboss-as?

3) I'm not making accusations or trying to cause trouble, but could
someone explain to an outsider what happened with Fedora 20 support?
oVirt is a complicated project to say the least and, after a brief
look at some of the RPMs last night, the packages are just as complex.
Basically, I'm trying to figure out if there were some intractable
problems that prevented oVirt from -- more or less -- shipping tweaked
Fedora 19 dependencies for oVirt on Fedors 20, or whether it was more
a lack of manpower, a lack of interested user base, or perhaps

I'm just getting started on digesting the packages, but I think it
should be feasible to pull the problematic packages from F19, tweak
them to ovirt-* versions (eg. ovirt-sos), and tweak the oVirt packages
to use the non-system paths for those packages. Publish the whole
thing through COPR, and if oVirt is happy with the results, merge them
into the official packages and repository.

I know that there will be some apprehension about the project taking
on maintaining these dependency packages, but I'm looking to get 3.4
working on Fedora 20 as a stopgap until 3.5 is released with support
for native packages.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Justin