[Owncloud] Owncloud on Fedora/RHEL 6

[Klaas Freitag]

On 13.01.2014 18:32, Matěj Cepl wrote:

Hi,

>
> On 2014-01-12, 20:32 GMT, Klaas Freitag wrote:
>> Where is that package, who maintains it and how long does it
>> take until it is updated after we released a new ownCloud
>> version? It is a problem for us if downstream falls behind
>> with the versions provided for the systems in question.
>
> You can get all these information from
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/owncloud
> (e.g., http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/owncloud.git/ shows
> all packaging files,
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/owncloud shows current
> updates in stable repos,
> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=15599
> shows builds (note, that F21 is current Rawhide)).
Thanks.

And here is the problem: Fedora 19 (!) seems to provide ownCloud 4.5.13 
which is about nine month old. That's not what people want. They want 
ownCloud 6. And we seek a way to provide them, even if they are on Fed19.

> I am not sure what is the name of the package maintainer
> (his/her Fedora login name is brummbq and he is also helped by
> Adam Williams, one of the Fedora QA people, who uses ownCloud
> for his own use), but what stops you from comaintaining the
> package? I couldn’t imagine any complaints if you stepped up and
> provided patches for (not that many) bugs against owncloud
> packages
> (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=component%3Aowncloud)
> or to start to comaintain the packages.
I know. People who do work are seldomly facing complaints for the fact 
that they do work ;-)

> Also, I am a Fedora provenpackager, so if there were any delays
> with building packages or something of that sort, I have power
> to push it through (of course, I would seek first advice from
> the current package maintainer).
>
>> We use the build system that suits us best to provide packages to the
>> ownCloud users very fast, and currently that is the openSUSE
>> Build Service.
>
> I am not big fan of the third party repos created by people who
> are not willing to work with the distro community (and looking
> at http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=owncloud I am not
> alone).
Yes, I know, I worked long enough for another distro. But one of the 
distro communities problems is that they don't really face todays 
reality: As said above, people want to have up-to-date apps. And if a 
new version (!) comes out, they wanna use it and not hear "Well, you 
have a nine month old version, and we will provide you with security 
fixes. Be happy!" They don't wanna have their operating system platform 
having dictating the versions of the apps they're using. You might want 
to check how that is on other, successful platforms like android how it 
works there. Time has changed a bit, and we as distro guys shouldn't 
close the eyes IMHO.

>
> I don’t understand the word “very fast” here. It certainly
> doesn’t mean speed literally.
Of course not. This is speed: If ownCloud upstream releases a new 
ownCloud version, the users can install it through their distro package 
manager an hour later. 6.0.0a on Fedora 19.

> Do you mean that your own repo allows
> you to create sloppy packages which break rest of the system? Do
> you mean that instead of proper resolving the issues you can
> introduce new versions of libraries incompatible with the rest
> of the system?  (is it finally possible to build owncloud client
> on RHEL-6 without introducing new versions of the third party
> libraries?) Do you mean that by hiding issue tracker you can
> happily ignore complaints of your users (where is the issue
> tracker of the Fedora/RHEL packages)?
Whooohooo, now you're starting! Please calm down a bit, we're not doing 
bad stuff intentional.

a) RHEL 6 ships Qt 4.6 IIRC. That is so much outdated that we could not 
backport the client without taking too much away. And RHEL not being 
desktop system no 1 on the planet, we decided to ship an useful Qt 
version in /opt/. I know, distro people hate that, but please consider 
reality here as well. What do users want? A _working_ solution. And I 
don't think that the Qt in /opt/.. steps in the way of anything else on 
the system as we also provide wrapper scripts.

b) issue tracker: https://github.com/owncloud/mirall/issues - not 
exactly hidden...

>> If the packages are not behaving well, please help us fixing.
>
> Why should I help to split Fedora/EPEL distro by supporting
> incompatible packages (and if they are not incompatible, what
> they are good for)?
Because you're a constructive guy that helps to provide the best for 
FOSS and it's users.

  > I don’t know where this mentality of splitting distro into
> thousand of incompatible subcommunities growth from? Ubuntu,
> with its PPAs, because Canonical doesn’t allow you to fix bugs
> in the core libraries, or what (not trying to libel them, just
> really honestly don’t know why you need to separate yourself
> from the rest of the Fedora/RHEL community)?
It's not that we want to separate, why should we? We see the benefit of 
stable and maintained distros. But as I tried to explain above: We want 
to provide our users with very current binary packages, as outlined, 
that is one of our main goals. As soon as we can solve that requirement 
with the main distros, we would love to drop our own packages.

Have you thought about how other web oriented platforms solve this 
problem? Why does the ruby gem stuff exist? Because they want to be 
faster than the distros update cycle, as we want. And I think you agree 
with me that a third party repo with proper rpms is the better solution.

>> Fully agreed. The problem is probably that nobody had time and
>> knowledge enough to get that fixed. Can you help us and test
>> and tell us what needs to be done to make it work well with
>> SELinux?
>
> Well, if you were using packages build together with the rest of
> the distro (so they would have proper configuration files,
> etc.), then you won’t need that time and knowledge yourself. You
> just file bugs to RH BZ. That’s what sharing is all about.
Again, I am happy to drop our Fedora/RHEL packages if we can manage to 
provide version update packages very fast for already released distros.

As long as we can not, I think we need to keep up our third party repo 
for those who are interested in new versions on your distro. If our 
packages are broken, sorry, please help us fixing.
How about coming you come up with concrete things to fix?

Having that said, I wonder if there is a cross distro dev room on FOSDEM 
this year? It would be great if the distro guys could discuss how the 
problem can be solved how version updates of leave packages  can provide 
fast through the standard distro channels. We're not the only ones with 
that problem.

BTW, we have an packaging at owncloud.org mailinglist to discuss this kind 
of topics. Not sure if somebody from Fedora is subscribed...

Thanks for your dedicated input on that, I appreciate it very much!

regards,

Klaas