Improving the distro packaging and installation experience

[James Blackwell]

On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 04:45:04PM +0000, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> For Windows, this is now pretty straightforward, though the fact that
> there are two installers is an unnecessary (IMO) complication. I would
> like to move the instructions for the Python-based Windows installer to
> the from-source-installation page, any objections on that front? Is the
> Python-based install a very popular option?

"very" is a strong word. The python based installation was the more
popular of the two when I was tracking adoption. Users had a fear that the
exe installer that came with python would botch their existing python
installs.  You'll probably want to address that concern before hiding the
one that users feel is safer to install.


> So this leaves us with the distro package situation.
> 
> Leaving aside Ubuntu, we basically have a situation where the Bazaar
> team makes regular releases which of course can't easily be retrofitted
> into many of the popular distro releases. I would like to propose that
> we maintain our OWN packages (and hence repositories) for the major distros:
> 
>  - Ubuntu
>  - Red Hat
>  - SUSE
>  - Debian

I'd also add cygwin, freebsd and target Fedora rather than Redhat. This
process is certainly possible and would help adoption. I'm probably not
saying anything that you don't know, but for the sake of completeness
(shrug)

 1) Installation instructions should be provided for each distribution for
 both manual package installation and for repository style installation
 when possible. A staggering number of users are not aware of how to
 manage dependancies manually with dpkg or how to hack their sources.list.
 Seriously.

 2) Version names should be chosen so that when the right version hits
 downstream that the user transparently upgrades to the official distro
 version if the same release is available.

 3) Don't forget dependant software packages (not just python)  which
 are often out of date as well. Paramiko, celementree, etc.


> For APT-based systems, we already have
> http://bazaar-vcs.org/packages/debs/ and I would like to understand if
> this is sufficient for Ubuntu AND Debian, and for multiple releases of
> those distros, or if we need to maintain current packages for the
> current stable versions of each of Ubuntu and Debian. For example, do we
> need a dapper, edgy, feisty, and sarge and etch, versions of the package?
>
> Separately, I'd like to understand what we need to do to support Red
> Hat, SUSE and other RPM-based distros better, across the Fedora as well
> as RHEL and OpenSUSE as well as SLED platforms, with multiple releases.

The issues involved for redhat systems are roughly equivilant to those for
Debian. Upstream can be sluggish when their focused on higher priority
issues, so you'll want the various repositories to contain the latest bzr
along with all the packages it depends on.  A quick poke at the repository
tells me that only bzr is available is in the repository. Snapshot bzr
should generally be ok with the newer distros and problematic with older
ones (particularly sarge). 

The easiest thing would be to provide repositories for all verisons of all
distros that want to be supported. Included should be bzr itself,
python-central, python-celementtree and python-paramiko.  Packages and
repos are usually about as easy to build for the fedora type systems as
debian systems and should be cronnable with a person checking on the
process every few days.


> Last, there are a number of distros mentioned with very old version
> numbers of Bazaar. Are those numbers correct, or are there newer
> versions accessible in those distros?

I maintained that page up until I left the company back in March, which
included informing upstreams of new versions, nagging them when new
verisons were ready for downstream, that the appropriate dependancies
were kept on track too...   Its your typical time consuming babysitting
task that involves a soft touch (its dependant upon the favor of the
distro maintainers)


> Ultimately, I would like that someone landing on that page can
> absolutely, unequivocally know how to download the latest version of
> Bazaar and related tools for the supported platform set, and do so in
> less than five minutes, following explicit, simple instructions on this
> page. At the moment, it's a little hand-wavy, obvious only to experts.

I bet the instructions could be simplified, especially if no one has
updated them since I wrote them almost a year ago. The situation should
have simplified somewhat since back then.


-- 
My home page:   <a href="http://jblack.linuxguru.net">James Blackwell</a>
Gnupg 06357400  F-print AAE4 8C76 58DA 5902 761D  247A 8A55 DA73 0635 7400
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