Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Volunteers to test OpenACS/AOLserver/PG7.1 RPMs wanted

Dave Bauer asks about a document describing where things are. Basically, yes, that is a necessary addition 😊

I covered some of that in the README-rpm.txt file included with the aolserver RPM, and of course the rpm -ql command will list all the files in each RPM just fine.

But yes, a document describing how I built these RPMs and why I did it that way is coming. These RPMs are available for testing right now. Eventually, once polished and refined, I would hope we could submit them to RH for possible inclusion. But not quite yet 😊 It's flattering that I'm getting questions about submission to RH already, but I think it might be a little early!!


The File Layout:

  • postgresql 7.1 is Lamar's work, he knows what he is doing and I believe that RH would have no problem accepting these RPMs.
  • aolserver is under /var/lib/aolserver except for

    • a config file in /etc/aolserver
    • include files in /usr/include/aolserver
    • libraries in /usr/lib/
    • binaries in /usr/bin
    • documentation under /usr/doc/aolserver-*/
    • init script in /etc/rc.d/init.d
    • log files will go under /var/log/aolserver
    • pid file will go under /var/run/aolserver

    This follows the PG RPM model reasonably closely, and I hope is fairly FHS compliant, though I don't want to claim that for them at this stage. First let's make it work for several testers, and get documentation reasonable, then we can look at 100% FHS compliance!

    It was FHS compliance issues (and a general "try to be Red-Hat-ish" mindset) that led to the file locations being different from the traditional ones. Just as the PG RPMs do not install to the places the PG tarball make install does.

  • aolserver-postgresql puts postgres.so into /usr/lib, along with the PG and aolserver libs.
  • openacs itself then sits under /var/lib/aolserver/servers/defaultacs/ . This seemed appropriate given the way AOLsever handles things, and avoids the very un-FHS /web oddity.

As the README-rpm.txt says:

Constructive comments and suggestions on this packaging approach are welcomed...

I'm not the experienced RPM creator that Lamar is. I have done some RPM work before, including building custom CD images based on RH but with extra stuff in them. But I have not done my RPM creation as publically as this before. If there are better ways, talk to me and I'll listen. One thing I have thought of would be for the openacs RPM to add a symlink in /etc/aolserver that points to the openacs parameter file... would that have been useful?

Dave: If I had put more info on file locations into a doc file under /usr/doc/openacs-3.2.*/ would you have looked there for it? If not, where would you have looked? Should we have a man page so that man openacs tells you about this? In other words, what is the logical place to put such a document?

Tom: Did you try the RPMs? Did they work as advertised for you? A few more test reports would help me believe that they really do work on computers that belong to other people too 😊