[PlanetCCRMA] Questions that might be able to be added to the FAQs

[William M. Quarles]

On 12/14/2009 3:04 PM, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-12-13 at 15:27 -0500, William M. Quarles wrote:
>> Hi Fernando (and fellow list subsribers),
>>
>> I have some questions that might belong in the FAQs. I'd also like to
>> know the answers to these.
>>
>> 1. At what point do you start building packages new Fedora releases?
>
> Well, as soon as I can :-) Usually I don't start trying to build package
> before the release but rather immediately after. How long it takes
> depends (at least historically) on how different is the build
> environment and how difficult it is to make packages build - big changes
> in gcc have made it complicated in the past, fc12 was not so bad.

I've just been a bit worried I suppose, because there still hasn't been 
an official announcement of complete (or at least near-complete) support 
for Fedora 11 or 12 on the Planet website yet. I've installed Planet 
CCRMA on Fedora 11 machine, but alas don't seem to ever get around to 
trying it out.

>> 2. How can I contribute to Planet CCRMA (besides branching the software
>> to cover other architectures/distributions)?
>
> If you have specific patches that address problems you could send them
> to me. What other architectures would you be interested in using?
> Distributions?

I was interested in trying to see if I could get Planet CCRMA RPMS to 
build on a ppc-based Power Mac running Fedora with just making the 
appropriate changes to config files and spec files of your existing 
SRPMs to adjust for the architecture. Do you think that might work? If 
not, the only programming languages that I ever learned to use were 
BASIC and FORTRAN, which I am sure doesn't help the Planet followers 
much. However, I would like to try see if the build can be done just by 
changing configs and specs.

> A very good way to contribute if you are into building packages would be
> to become a Fedora packager and try to move packages from Planet CCRMA
> to Fedora. There are many that could be moved, the more that are in
> Fedora proper the better...

Gee, I thought you used to detest the idea of moving packages over to 
the f.k.a. "Fedora Extras." What's changed?

>> 3. How can I build a custom kernel from the Planet CCRMA kernel-rt SRPM?
>> (I've tried using the instructions from the Fedora Project Wiki on
>> Fedora 10 and I don't think that they quite translate over to the Planet
>> kernel-rt SRPMs. Not only that, I have doubts that they still are valid
>> for the actual Fedora kernel SRPMs for Fedora 11 and above, because they
>> don't seem to work without modifications to the spec file).
>
> I think building from the srpm should be the same as for other Fedora
> kernels. You do have to use the proper .src.rpm package - for example
> older kernels will probably not build correctly for fc12. Which one are
> you interested in rebuilding?

I think I had tried rebuilding Planet real-time kernels for 9 and 10 
back when I had those installed, and neither would work. There was 
always a compile-time error. I think I even tried rebuilding without 
changing the config file nor the spec file, and I couldn't get the 
PLanet rt kernel to build. Also, it looked as if the config files I made 
for those kernels get overwritten or bypassed in the spec file such that 
a default config file is used anyway, although I'm not entirely certain 
of that. I might be wrong, but it looks like the same bypass/overwriting 
is happening when I try to rebuild a custom kernel based on the standard 
non-rt Fedora kernels on Fedora 12.

Peace,
William