Archive for the ‘Announcements’ category

Platforms

January 16th, 2013

In this video, Dagobert Michelsen talks about ‘platforms’, a part of setup which allows you to build packages for SPARC and Intel with a single mgar invocation.

Watch it here: OpenCSW buildfarm setup – platforms

If you have any questions or comments, drop by our IRC channel.

Modulations in GAR

January 6th, 2013

In this video, Dagobert Michelsen presents how to roll multiple versions of the same software into a single package, or a set of related packages.

Watch it here: OpenCSW package building – modulations

If you have any questions or comments, drop by our IRC channel.

Tutorial: Patching source code in GAR

December 26th, 2012

Here’s one more tutorial, showing how to package a piece of software that would not compile out of the box, and needs to be patched.

If you have any questions or comments, drop by our IRC channel.

GAR setup and packaging tutorial

December 18th, 2012

If you were thinking about trying to build packages on your own, here’s a 35 minute long video showing how to set up GAR on your own Solaris 10 host. It starts with a freshly installed Solaris 10 and ends with a built package.

If you have any questions or comments, drop by our IRC channel.

Roadmap for 2013

November 24th, 2012

Most of the year 2012 at OpenCSW was spent trying to keep up to date with core packages, and testing the new package flow. The unstable catalog was getting very frequent updates directly from package maintainers. The dublin catalog was periodically synchronized from the unstable catalog, until the OpenSSL update came along. The library update turned out to be non-trivial, and resulted in the dublin catalog freeze. We have the capacity to rebuilt packages for the dublin catalog, but most of the new work goes towards new packages.

We’ve created a new catalog called ‘kiel’. It is a snapshot of the unstable catalog, featuring OpenSSL 1.0.0 and other updates. If you want OpenSSL 1.0.0, this is the catalog you should use. It will kept getting periodic updates from unstable, the way the dublin catalog used to. You need to configure pkgutil to point to the release name.

We’ve also created the next catalog, called ‘bratislava’, which is currently only a placeholder for some experiments we’re about to make. We’re still collecting ideas, but the main one is that we’ll build it from scratch, with some fundamental changes: there will be no CSWcommon, and everything will be built with GCC by default. We also want to make it possible to bootstrap OpenCSW at a different prefix than /opt/csw, allowing others to build their own software stacks based on our code base.

The progress on the IPS catalog is slow, but the effort is ongoing.

The short outline of our 2013 plans is:

  • Keep the ‘stable‘ URL empty for until mid-2013 to make sure that people notice that they shouldn’t be using it.
  • When mid-2013 arrives, promote dublin to stable and promote kiel to testing.
  • Build bratislava.
  • Build an IPS catalog.

We hope our packages make your life easier. If you feel like talking to us, hop on the IRC channel.

‘stable’ declared dead

November 12th, 2012

If you visit our mirror and try to pull packages from the ‘stable’ catalog, you will get an error. This is intentional, as described in the README file.

The toplevel stable catalog is considered to be dead. Please choose another
catalog which is maintained. The old stable/ is still available under /legacy,
so if you must subscribe to that one, but keep in mind that the old stable
is totally unmaintained.

Kind regards

  -- Dagobert Michelsen (mirror maintainer)

This edition of the ‘stable’ catalog has been unmaintained since 2008.

We intend to keep the ‘stable’ directory in this state for at least half a year, to give people a chance to notice. Then the ‘dublin’ release will be promoted to stable. In the meantimeBall, we are working on the ‘kiel’ release, which among other things, features the transition to OpenSSL 1.0.

The ‘dublin’ catalog is in freeze

June 23rd, 2012

We have frozen migrations from the unstable catalog to ‘dublin’. In the unstable catalog, there’s a large ongoing upgrade of OpenSSL, from version 0.9.8 to 1.0.0. It requires many rebuilds. Some of the packages linking to the old version of OpenSSL are hard to rebuild, and we’ll be potentially dropping them rather than rebuilding. This concerns mostly desktop applications, as we’re moving towards specializing in server related software.

The upgrade only concerns the Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 catalogs. Solaris 9 will remain with OpenSSL 0.9.8.

The ‘dublin’ catalog will be no longer receiving package version upgrades, but we are working towards a setup in which we can provide security fixes for it.

pkgutil −−cleanup

May 28th, 2012

If you’re upgrading OpenCSW packages installed on your systems, you’ve noticed the ongoing package renames and splits. We’re actively working on splitting shared libraries into own packages, and corresponding header and *.so files into the *_dev packages. To make sure the dependency continuity between older packages and the libraries, we’re providing *_stub packages. If you have a long-standing OpenCSW installation, chances are that many of the *_stub packages are not necessary any more. To make it easier to detect and remove obsoleted packages, we provide a simple framework which allows packaging tools to scan and detect obsoleted packages. To use it with pkgutil, type:

pkgutil --cleanup

If there are any obsoleted packages on your system (usually only empty stubs), they will get removed. As always, a bit of caution is advised. Don’t do it on your production system before testing it first.

Spring cleaning

April 16th, 2012

During the Wintercamp in Bratislava this weekend, we have dropped from the catalog a number of packages which we considered not useful. Some packages were just too old, or newer versions were available elsewhere. Others were discontinued projects, or packages that simply don’t work any more. The full list of dropped packages (with comments) is available in the Wintercamp 2011 minutes document.

If we happened to drop something that you care about, give us a shout! You can request the package through the request form, or talk to us on IRC at #opencsw on Freenode.

IPS repository in the works

February 17th, 2012

We are currently working towards an IPS repository with the OpenCSW package set. What we have achieved so far is setting up the complete build environment for Solaris 11 connected to the buildfarm being able to produce packages in the SysV format for Solaris 11. The master mirror also has been equipped with a repository server which is not yet populated. The next step involves adding another backend to our buildsystem GAR to produce native IPS packages.

UPDATE: Please see http://www.opencsw.org/2015/01/no-progress-on-the-ips-repository/