Shibboleth-IDP rpm packaging

[Cantor, Scott]

On 6/15/19, 5:32 PM, "dev on behalf of Philip Prindeville" <dev-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of philip.prindeville at gigamon.com> wrote:

> And then sit back and enjoy.

You can't meet the contract people expect of RPM software with this unless you embed a container in the package, which is not impossible but not what we have done to this point. Doing so would necessitate frequent, unpredictable patches, and is incredibly limiting to all but the most trivial deployments. We do this on Windows, but expanding that isn't terribly attractive.

Otherwise you can't assume anything about it, and so you cannot achieve a seamless upgrade that would correctly stop and restart the system. RPMs are all about the upgrade, that's where the hard part is.

Even if you could manage it, maintaining upgrade fidelity is incredibly hard with a Spring-based system. People that use RPMs don't tolerate *any* failures, and since they are unavoidable in practice here due to minor mistakes, it's just not feasible IMHO. And major upgrades using an RPM will never be anything but a giant time sink that we would never be willing to commit the project to, so I don't think it will ever be a deliverable of the project.

-- Scott