[Owncloud] Owncloud on Fedora/RHEL 6

[Klaas Freitag]

On 19.01.2014 21:06, Matěj Cepl wrote:

Hi Matěj,

>
> And if insted of pushing new version to your system (or OpenSUSE
> build) you would push it to the Koji, then you would have build
> for Rawhide and -testing distros in the same time.
How about already released versions of Fedora? For example, will it be 
possible to provide _version_ updates of ownCloud to users of Fedora 20 
through Koji? AFAIK for released distros, only security fixes but no 
version updates are allowed?!

If it is possible to ship version updates of ownCloud through the 
official Fedora channels within hours or days, we could immediately 
switch to Koji, as I said before.

>
>> They don't wanna have their operating system platform having
>> dictating the versions of the apps they're using.
>
> ??? Nobody dictates you anything, if you put you hand down to
> the shovel.
You misunderstood. I meant: If the distro does not allow version 
updates, it dictates you more or less which version of ownCloud you as a 
user can use.

>> 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.
>
> If you think that the mess of multiple copies of huge libraries
> bundled in individual packages half of them unmaintained (a mess
> from which Java folks are trying to get out ...
> http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsaw/ ... so far
> unsuccessfully) and thus half of them with unpatched security
> vulnerabilities makes me envious, then you are sorely mistaken.
Haha, me neither of course. But we have to admit: Even though users are 
pestering their systems and probably get into dangerous situations 
without realizing that, Android as a system is hugely successful. People 
_want_ that. Unfortunately.

>
> I didn’t say that. Just because you are doing your separate
> community, you didn’t have time and resources to do it
> correctly. Completely without any sneering, how should I report
> bugs against your RHEL packaging? GitHub Issue tracker?
Yes, please. It is useful to prepend the subject with something like 
[Packaging].

>
>> 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 That is so much outdated that we could not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.
>
> What do users want? Well, users of RHEL want also _maintained_
> solution. Are you certain you will maintain Qt (it is a huge
> library) as well as Fedora maintainers? As I said we have php53
> package (for EPEL 5; don’t tell me how RHEL-6 is obsolete before
> supporting RHEL-5 ;)), or perhaps somebody can think about
> patching reasonable subset of owncloud-client to work with old
> Qt, or perhaps old owncloud-client can be patched to work with
> new server API. Something. Reasonable people are able to
> negotiate solutions for their problems.
We used to maintain patches for Qt 4.6, but at some point of it was not 
longer reasonable. So hard to find a good solution. I am sure we're not 
alone with the problem on RHEL and, if you search, you find more project 
shipping their "own" Qt.

>
>> 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.
>
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/list/*rubygem* well
> not exactly shabby.
I know, all distros package gems, perl modules etc. But for the distro 
users, there are always the two alternatives: Do I use the distro 
package of the ldap gem (example) or do I use gem install which brings a 
newer version but conflicts with my installed other ruby stuff.

The philosophy behind in the ruby world is: Since using gem is so easy, 
we can provide new and incompatible versions very often and quick. Bad 
for "traditional" distro users.

>> 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?
>
> I am sorry, I have already too much on my plate, and I don’t
> know any PHP, so with regards to ownCloud I am just (very happy
> and excited) pure user.
Hmm, see what I mean? I am quite busy in implementing more cool desktop 
client sync features or fix bugs in there. So that is why our packages 
are not yet optimal: Nobody has time to make them really good. So 
everybody who has some minutes left: Please jump in and help!

regards,

Klaas