IdP packaging for Linux (deb/rpm)

[Cantor, Scott]

On 5/13/15, 8:26 AM, "Etienne Dysli-Metref" 
<etienne.dysli-metref at switch.ch> wrote:


>
>Oh I was just mentioning building containers as something else that
>benefits from packages. I don't expect you to ship one! ;)

I know, but my assumption would be that the packaging strategy would have 
to be influenced by those requirements. Not understanding any sort of 
end-state goal makes it hard to know what has to be "fixed".

>Yeah just packaging the IdP as RPM and/or DEB, nothing else. The rest
>(Java, servlet container) is already packaged by Linux distributions.

Badly, with unsupported versions, and with a JDK that doesn't work. So 
that's a problem. I don't want to ship a package that essentially 
guarantees people end up using other packages I know don't work well and 
are unreliable. OpenJDK has caused me hours upon hours of wasted debugging 
time, and it is extremely close to being flat-out unsupported. I thnk it 
would take one more major incident to push me over that line.

>Since both RPM and DEB have virtual packages, I don't think you'd have
>to suffer a dependency on OpenJDK. Just depend on "java" or "java-1.7.0"
>(RedHat) or "java7-runtime-headless" (Debian) then deployers can choose
>which flavour to install.

I wasn't aware Oracle's RPM thing supplied a dependency label that matched 
what OpenJDK does. I don't use the Oracle RPM myself.

>My employer is a consortium member so maybe we can work something out
>using my time. I'm not much into administrative matters though, I just
>write code. ;)

Contributions don't have to come from member organizations of course (and 
that alone doesn't meet the requirements for contributions due to IPR 
issues), but any help is always welcome.

But there are very people who can write code, thanks to the web, so the 
few of us around really should be spending our time on that and not on 
things that other people should have the ability to contribute to.

-- Scott