2016-11-28

Abiword for EL-7

Over Thanksgiving break, I decided to go through a long list of emails that were marked "when you have a spare moment". I really didn't have one but I realized that many of those emails were crufty and old. One was some people asking about getting abiword together for EL-7. This looked like a straightforward enough task so I got into it and started working out all the packages that would need to be branched to say EPEL and what would be needed to compile them.
At first the packages were pretty easy to bring over from Fedora:

  • ./aiksaurus/aiksaurus-1.2.1-34.el7.centos.src.rpm
  • ./gtkmathview/gtkmathview-0.8.0-19.el7.centos.src.rpm 
  • ./libwps/libwps-0.4.4-1.el7.centos.src.rpm 
  • ./wv/wv-1.2.9-13.el7.centos.src.rpm 
  • ./loudmouth/loudmouth-1.5.3-1.el7.centos.src.rpm  
  • ./ots/ots-0.5.0-12.el7.centos.src.rpm
Then we got to the ones which didn't compile so cleanly.
  • ./minisat/minisat2-2.2.0-5.fc18.src.rpm
  • ./link-grammar/link-grammar-5.0.8-3.el7.centos.src.rpm
  • ./abiword/abiword-3.0.1-12.el7.centos.src.rpm

The latest minisat2 does compile but I was getting all kinds of compilation errors with link-grammar-5.3 in using it. Backing down to an older version of minisat2 and link-grammar I could get other parts to compile but I could not get abiword to compile. Through some pointers from Yaakov  Selkowitz who had dealt with this package in Cygwin, I was able to get it compiled. I then opened an email to the link-grammar people who figured out that there was a bug in their code when compiling on CentOS or Scientific Linux.  They haven't spun a new release with the fix yet but when they do I can update the packages.  At the moment, the abiword package has to be compiled with the --disable-introspection flag which probably limits some functionality.
In the end, we have a set of packages now available for testing a copr:


[smooge-Abiword]
name=Copr repo for Abiword owned by smooge
baseurl=https://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/smooge/Abiword/epel-7-$basearch/
type=rpm-md
skip_if_unavailable=True
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/smooge/Abiword/pubkey.gpg
repo_gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
enabled_metadata=1

Good luck and let me know if it works for you.

Where has puppet gone in EPEL-6

This week various people using EPEL on RHEL and CentOS 6 have found that the puppet package is no longer provided by EPEL. The reason for this is due to the way EPEL packages are built and kept inside the repository. A package needs a sponsor so that we can hopefully get bug fixes and security updates to it. In the case of puppet this package is sponsored by the user kanarip. However, most packages aren't whole pieces, they rely on other software.. in this case the package puppet relies on a lot of different ruby gems of which one of them was called ruby-shadow. This package was orphaned 30 weeks ago and while it did have other people watching it, none of them took over the package.



Depending on: ruby-shadow (3), status change: 2016-04-13 (30 weeks ago)
        puppet (maintained by: kanarip, domcleal, gchamoul, georgiou, jehane, jpo, lzap, mmagr, moses, rharrison, skottler, stahnma)
                puppet-2.7.26-2.el6.noarch requires ruby-shadow = 1.4.1-13.el6

        puppet-gluster (maintained by: averi, purpleidea)
                puppet-gluster-0.0.3-1.el6.noarch requires puppet = 2.7.26-2.el6

        puppetlabs-stdlib (maintained by: averi, gchamoul, purpleidea, shlomizadok)
                puppetlabs-stdlib-4.5.1-2.20150121git7a91f20.el6.noarch requires puppet = 2.7.26-2.el6

Last week a large cleanup was done to clean out orphaned packages from EPEL which removed ruby-shadow. Once that was removed, then all of the other packages depending on ruby-shadow were also removed. Today various people reinstalling systems found puppet wasn't around and came onto #epel to ask.. which seems to have gotten the packages responsored and hopefully they will be back in the EPEL release in a day or so.

This problem has been happening a lot lately. I think it shows quite a few problems with how EPEL is set up and managed. For this, I take responsibility as I said I would try to clean it up after FOSDEM 2016 and it is still happening.

[Correction 2016-12-01 added. Please see my updated post.]

2016-11-16

Another tale, apropos nothing again

When Nema got back to her village she found that her house had nothing in it for planting the next year. Her parents were dead, and her younger brothers were used to drinking and gambling at the tavern house with what was left of the inheritance.

Now the Duke's fields had been cleared recently, and it was the law that peasants could gather any seed left over from the harvest. Nema asked her brothers if they would come help her do so. 

"Not I" they said, for they had games they wanted to play.

So Nema went through the fields and gathered as much seed as she could get. 

When the spring came, she needed to plant the seeds. She asked her brothers if they would help.

"Not I" they said, for they had ale they wanted to drink.

The grain grew and it needed to be harvested. Nema asked her brothers again if they would help.

"Not I" they said for their was both ale and games to think about.

The grain was harvested and milled at the miller. It was time to bake the bread, but none of the brothers were around to help out. Yet when the bread was just out of the oven.. who were to show up? All the brothers asking for bread.

Now Nema could have said something like "Thems that works gets to eat." but she was kind hearted and liked to share. So she gave them loaves from the oven and what did they cry out? "We wanted pumpernickel and this is just plain rye". 


A tale apropos nothing

Once long ago, there was a war where many soldiers went off to war. In those days, win or lose if the war was over you were dropped out of the army and walked your way back to your home countless miles away.

Now there was one formerly conscripted soldier named Nema who walked through the forests and she came upon a village. Now Nema was very hungry but had no money as whatever payment was either long gone. She begged from house but found that the villagers did not like soldiers and told her to go somewhere else. In fact, the villagers were tired of soldiers and fighting and looting and always being the ones trodden on. They didn't even like each other that much because they were all sure that someone had been a collaborator sending soldiers to their house to take their last food.

When the villager had gone to all the houses, Nema sat in the square wondering what to do. Her grumbling stomach told her that she couldn't walk to another village. She had nothing to trade as the only weapon the army had let her take back, an axe, had broken when she had cut wood for her meal to villages back. Looking at the head of the axe an idea sprang into her mind. Nema remembered that one of the villagers had a large cauldron in her front yard.. probably to clean clothes or something..

Going to the villager hut, Nema asked again if she could borrow the pot to make a soup. She would clean it out as a service but she had a magical axe which just needed some water and a fire to make the tastiest soup ever. The old villager eyed Nema as crazy, but because the cauldron was outside and it did need a good cleaning thought it would be an even score. Nema cleaned the pot and gathered water from the village well. She got a fire going and put her axe in it.

The villagers started to gather around this crazy soldier and with much laughter asking how the water soup tasted. Nema would spoon out a bit and say "hmm it is OK but it just needs something to flavor it up a bit." One of the villagers thought and said "Oh I have some old beans.. maybe that will do it." They got the beans from where ever they were hidden and the soldier put it in the pot. Again the villagers asked "oh how is the soup". The soldier stirred some more and said "Oh the beans helped a lot but now it needs a balance." Another villager remembered some old carrots and onions they had. These were added to the pot. This went on for a while and shortly afterwords there was a wondrous soup for everyone to share and eat.

After all the soup had been divvied up, Nema took her magic axe head out of the bottom and put it back in her pouch. She would make it back to her own village many miles away, and this villagers would talk with each other and make many soups from what they had through the long winter.

2016-11-10

Updating Nagios in EPEL-7 (Looking for Testers)

One of the projects on my plate this year is to update the Fedora Project nagios server so that monitoring is done through a better template system in ansible. [The main reasons for using nagios versus going to another system are the following: a) We already have nagios in place and have used it for years, b) it doesn't use/need a database backend for either its webpages or monitoring systems, c) before I can compare other systems I need an updated version of nagios to know what features we would get.]

In looking at Nagios, I found that the current maintainer was not responding to tickets. In fact at the time I was looking for him, their email domain wasn't registered in DNS or whois. While that has been fixed, there has been no response to emails so I have had to start the Non Responsive Packager process. The other item found was that we had various problems in the 4.0.8 package which were only supported and fixed in the current version 4.2.2 . While I started working on this, a person with the nick of Petaris showed up in #epel on freenode with the same problem. They needed to get an updated package into place and were looking for help on what was needed to update the package. Jason Tibbitts helped him set up an fedpkg environment and worked through a couple of problems that were happening. Last week, I looked over the package some more and realized there were problems with the old layout.

The upstream Nagios package assumes that it has complete write access to /var so it drops various configuration and control files in the %localstatedir configuration point. That doesn't work in things like Fedora (and probably Debian?) where it was chosen to put all of that in /var/log/nagios/ . This allowed for everything to be in one spot but as the Nagios code gets more complex more subdirectories with different needs occur (including it looked like /var/log/nagios/log/). I reworked the patches so that they allowed for /var as the %localstatedir and then put various control files in /var/spool/nagios and the log files and their archives in /var/log/nagios. [This may be the wrong place, please let me know and I can fix.]

Petaris took the patches and some other comments and put together a koji build that has the test code in it. Work was also put together on updating nrpe to version 3.0.1 and nagios-plugins to 2.1.3. There is an selinux problem we are trying to work together with a policy that should allow people to work until it is fixed upstream.

In order to make testing easier, I have created a copr for all the current Nagios packages. Currently it works on EPEL-7.

dnf copr enable smooge/Nagios_Update # if you have CentOS dnf
yum copr enable smooge/Nagios_Update # may work also.

Depending on the feedback I am getting on this, I can then work on updating the packages in EPEL-6 and Fedora Rawhide. [This is also my first copr in a long time so I may have built things in a less than optimal way.]