Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Benjamin Franksen <[email protected]> · Fri, 25 Nov 2016 18:28:42 +0100

On 17.11.2016 00:59, Konrad, Martin wrote:
> Hi Bruce,
>> Relying on yum repo installation of third party packages wasn't
>> working as the available package versions were often way out of
>> date.
> I guess that's the price you pay for sticking to the same RHEL version
> for 10 years ;-) We are planning to upgrade our OS more frequently
> (whenever a new Debian version is released).
> 
>> To handle this, we created a python based system we call package
>> manager.    It consists of python scripts that know how to build and
>> install typical c/c++ unix packages from tarballs using ./configure,
>> make, make install, and also how to build and install python packages
>> using setup.py build and setup.py install.    For each package type,
>> there's also a dependency file to specify version specific package
>> dependencies, and a short python file to handle quirks of each 
>> package type.    For an easy package the new python code is about 10
>> lines of boilerplate, but we've also handled builds which use qmake,
>> autogen, cmake, etc.    We can also customize configure arguments,
>> build arguments, add missing headers, customize installs etc.
>
> If you go through all that pain you can also package your software into
> RPMs. We are building Debian packages for almost everything. The nice
> thing about this is that we can leverage the Debian community's big pool
> of packaging/build tools. Have a look at [1] for an example of the kind
> of meta data we add to turn something into a proper Debian package. [2]
> is an example for the build rules that are automatically generated by
> the Debian tools (we usually don't need to touch them).

Or you could use NixOS (http://nixos.org/), a linux distribution with a
non-destructive package manager. The advantage here is that you can have
different /development/ versions or configurations of a package
installed, something that is not easily possible in Debian & co. You can
even set up things so that regular users can install packages (which are
nevertheless shared between users).

Cheers
Ben
-- 
"Make it so they have to reboot after every typo." ― Scott Adams

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System