Winter 2011 Handout - Fedora-ARM Package Building and Troubleshooting

Status

This page status is: DRAFT.

Title

Fedora-ARM packaging and troubleshooting

Participants

Michael John Corsame
Andrew Parda
Rocella Jimenez
Chantell McIntosh

Introduction

We came in storming like it was the beach of Normandy all over again. As my fellow Canadian patriot's would say "EHH?!". A group of students undergo a school semester of building packages that were fedora 13 package updates. Not know what we were getting into we sure had excitement and determination in our eyes to get this project finished. Little did we know was that, we still haven't fully understood how the process of troubleshooting and building packages was or how big the arm package build farm was. It was indeed a project filled with doubts, hope and fulfillment.

These group of students mentioned at the top, right below "participants" are students that have little knowledge of how helpful the fedora community is. Being introduce to a vast growing community created room for improvement and friendships. It was indeed a huge improvement on how we tackled those packages we built and without the fedora community, we've pretty much would have been clueless throughout the semester.

At first we were just breaking in and had no clue where to start, but as things started to move and had our Build Master guide us toward the right direction we began building. Of course we needed to learn how to build in order to do this project, so we all took the time to learn efficient methods in doing this. As we imported what we learned into building, we began building our very first package. Being our first build, of course we had errors and errors that we have not encountered before as well, but was pretty self explanatory. Once we've figured out what things we had to fix for that package we ran it through once again and thus having an outcome of "Closed" bold in green - meaning it was completed for that arch.

From there on we begun tackling other packages within the fedora 13 update package list that needed to be built for the ARM architecture. If we had issues with one specific package we told one another that we wouldn't dwell on it for long and move to another one, but of course we would have to come back to that package that we couldn't build for ARM. If the errors we encountered for that package was not within our knowledge to fix, we would either research what causes this online or ask the fedora community. As it turns out we've got a long way to go in finishing up this fedora 13 update packages for ARM, but again, it's a process that needs a lot of patience and understanding why this specific package will/or will not build for ARM.

Approach

Our approach was simple; Go through the list of failed packages that aren't building for Fedora ARM and try our best to troubleshoot them. Also, we had to have an understanding of why these packages were failing to build and finally... attempt to build them again. At the beginning of the semester we were provided with a list of failed packages as a point to start off from. As the list of packages grew, so did our experience with building these packages.

We would make tickets for each of the problem packages we came across, in order to provide a reference for the problems we were coming across. The work we did was mostly geared toward the F13-ARM packages. Saying that, Our expected result was resolving problems with the Fedora-ARM builds as quickly as possible and help F13-ARM release before the end of the semester. Fedora 13 ARM Beta Release was released on February 23, 2011. Other resources we used to complete our objective was the Fedora-ARM Koji build system and arm@lists.fedoraproject.org mailing list.

Challenges

Rocella

Results

Chantell

Links

• http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Fedora-ARM_Package_Building_and_Troubleshooting/Problems --> Problems Page
• http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Fedora-ARM_Package_Building_and_Troubleshooting --> Project Page
• https://fedorahosted.org/arm/report/1 --> tickets page

Acknowledgments

Chris Tyler

Paul Whalen

Niels De Vos

Pictures / Graphics

All of us

File:Http://padresteve.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/d-day-landing-june-1944-omaha-beach-in-normandy-france.jpg