Hello, This has been an interesting discussion to follow. Here are my thoughts on the RPM packaging...
On 6/16/05, Jeff Squyres <jsquy...@open-mpi.org> wrote: [snip] > We've also got the "announce" mailing list -- a low volume list just > for announcing new releases (and *exciting* messages about products you > might be interested in... just kidding.). ;-) [snip] > We actually got a lot of help in this area from Greg Kurtzer from LBL > (of cAos/Warewulf/Centos fame). He helped us a bunch with our > [previously extremely lame] LAM/MPI .spec file, and then offered to > write one for Open MPI (which he did about a month or two ago). > > I have some random user questions about RPMs, though: > > 1. Would you prefer an all-in-one Open MPI RPM, or would you prefer > multiple RPMs (e.g., openmpi-doc, openmpi-devel, openmpi-runtime, > ...etc.)? I prefer split RPMs. The fingrained split you mention works well for thin/diskless-nodes, but a simple split of runtime vs everything-else would be "good enough". The primary problem with an all-in-one RPM would be the footprint of the non-MPI packages that satisfy MPI's dependence tree, especially the compilers. > 2. We're definitely going to provide an SRPM suitable for "rpmbuild > --rebuild". However, we're not 100% sure that it's worthwhile to > provide binary RPMs because everyone's cluster/development systems seem > to be "one off" from standard Linux distros. Do you want a binary > RPM(s)? If so, for which distros? (this is one area where vendors > tend to have dramatically different views than academics/researchers) If you supply fairly clean SRPMs, I think the distros themselves can do the binary RPM building themselves. At least that is easy enough for cAos to do. I guess the problem lies in the disparity in the distribution release cycle and Open MPI's expected release cycle. Certain RedHat distribution versions shipped with amazingly old versions of LAM/MPI, which I recall caused no end of trouble on the LAM/MPI mailing lists with questions from long-ago fixed bugs. How much is it worth to the Open MPI team to be able to answer those questions with: rpm -Uvh http://open-mpi.org/..../open-mpi-1.0-fixed.x86_64.rpm rather than having to explain how to do "rpmbuild --rebuild". I'll suggest that eventually you will want binary RPMs for SUSE 9.3 and CentOS 4 and/or Scientific Linux 4 in both i386 & x86_64 flavors. I'm sure you will get demand for a lot of Fedora Core flavors, but I think that road leads to madness... I think it might work out better to try and get Open MPI into Dag Wieers RPM/APT/YUM repositories... see: http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/ or the still-under-construction RPMforge site: http://rpmforge.net/ That's more than my two cents... -- Tim Mattox - tmat...@gmail.com http://homepage.mac.com/tmattox/ I'm a bright... http://www.the-brights.net/
