Alfresco is one of the applications I’ve heard regular chatter around, “It would be great if it were packaged for Fedora.” In fact, the breakdown of JARs and some of the dependencies for Alfresco was one of the starting actions of the Fedora ISV special interest group.
Do you have any interest in seeing Alfresco packaged for Fedora? Having it in an EPEL repository for use in Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.5 (& v.4?) would be great …
Do you have any skill and experience at estimating how much work is involved in the packaging effort for Alfresco?
Recall that Fedora Release Engineering specifically recommends, 1.) get your package in JPackage.org, 2.) put it in Fedora, 3.) maintain it in both. That’s the recommended way to prepare for the future, whatever it holds.
Why am I asking? I’ll tell you …
Someone with a desire to see Alfresco packaged for their enterprise environment + willingness to invest resources has asked me about this effort.
The first thing I need to deliver is an estimate that lets them know if they should continue pursuing this route or pull back and do an ugly wrapper-package that doesn’t use system libraries and other horrenduous ugliness we don’t want them to suffer under. You all know how it is …
This is a chance for a few dedicated folks to get together and produce a fine set of packages for a much-desired enterprise CMS. If you are interested, leave a comment to this post, or contact me via the usual places.
I think Alfresco will be hard to package.
Warning: rant follows, keep reading on your own risk 😉
I’ve deployed the OS version several times in CentOS 5.x and it’s PITA. Alfresco open source model of development sucks (IMHO), because the OS version usually has not the required level of quality to be in production.
I know it’s the Alfresco strategy to get people into paid support, but it’s very disappointing (the quality of the releases is bad, they don’t fix bugs -even severe- until next release, the configuration is a messy bunch of XML, the documentation is bad, …).
As you should have noticed I’m not a big Alfresco fan. In my company we’ve discarded Alfresco and we’re using Nuxeo for different projects.
I don’t want to discourage to any packager, I just wanted to say that it will be painful 🙂
Those are fair points, and we may discover it’s all a big mess, as Spot did with Chromium. My hope is that packaging on the community side will influence their packaging on the paid support side. I’m certain that the enterprises I’m talking to are interested in supported versions, but they don’t want crack-rock packaging or insecure, unmanageable jarballs. Since the place where we have a whisper of a chance to influence packaging is on the community version, that’s where we start. Heck, it worked for Fedora, which improved the quality of packages in RHEL et al. 🙂
Shouldn’t we focus on getting cough-simple-cough stuff like jboss in fedora first?
Don’t think I haven’t thought of doing general calls for help around JBoss applications. 🙂 But that is, as you imply, a pretty complex beast, and there is an entire team of smart cats at JBoss.org that know all the right people to help … far better than I do. If they come to Community Architecture asking for our help in duplicating what Fedora does so well, we’ll give it. In the meantime, getting the Alfresco needle progressed a bit might help sway some opinions about the feasibility of packaging Java apps for Fedora.
The first thing to solve for JBoss would be to get a recent version of Maven packaged[0]. Once you’ve got the build system, you then can start of the dependencies.
[0] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Java/JPPMavenReadme
I’m still not fully understanding the disconnect with Maven and Fedora, need to do more research here. Fortunately, it appears I know the packager, so I’ll work from there.
When did we recommend putting anything in JPackage?
September 2008:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-isv-sig-list/2008-September/msg00000.html
I got that from Jesse Keating in a thread that I think you had been on originally but may have bowed out of by then.
Until I get better advice or directions from Fedora releng, that’s the simple message I’m continuing to broadcast.
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