Re: [IBMiOSS] gcc for all Litmis Spaces?

"OpenSource" <opensource-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on 08/18/2016
07:03:33 PM:

From: John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>
To: IBMi Open Source Roundtable <opensource@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 08/18/2016 07:03 PM
Subject: Re: [IBMiOSS] gcc for all Litmis Spaces?
Sent by: "OpenSource" <opensource-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Thanks, Kevin, that was a very digestible explanation of OBS from a
somewhat less high altitude, and I definitely understand more about it
now than before. I still am wondering a few things, though. And I
think they may have less to do with OBS or any other system of that
type, and more to do with building native software in general.
(Because my ignorance is just that pervasive.)

Like, suppose someone has set up NumPy to be built for Ubuntu using
OBS. They only have experience with Ubuntu (not even other flavors of
Linux), so that's the only platform they've set up. If someone else
comes along and figures out the whole build process for NumPy on PASE,
do they look for the existing NumPy project on OBS and add PASE as a
target? Or does PASE-NumPy become a separate OBS project from
Ubuntu-NumPy?

Looking at it from the other axis, given that someone has set up a
NumPy-for-PASE build on OBS, if someone else wants to build Pillow for
PASE using OBS, can they leverage anything from the existing PASE
efforts on OBS?

OBS has the concepts of Projects. Projects contain a collection of
packages and Projects can also have sub-projects In OBS, users also get a
Home project (and sub-projects) where they can build their own packages.
The model is very much like GitHub. You fork a package, make some changes,
commit them, and send a pull request. So you can definitely build off the
knowledge of others and we can certainly pull in those packages that
already exist in OBS to use as a template. We'll probably need changes to
get them to build in PASE and that may not be something that the upstream
(openSUSE) developers want to maintain, so we may need to keep our
separate, but there's nothing stopping us from collaborating.

The great thing is that once someone gets a package working, it gets built
and everyone is able to benefit by adding that repository (and provided we
get a package manager like yum or zypper or apt built) they can just
install it.

Since you brought up NumPy, here's the package in OBS:
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/openSUSE:Factory/python3-numpy and
here's the spec file (build file for building the RPM):
https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/openSUSE:Factory/python3-numpy/python3-numpy.spec?expand=1

On the right you can see the build results. The table is separated in to 3
columns, the first being the platform (usually this would be like
openSUSE, Ubuntu 16.04, ...), the second is the architecture (i586,
x86_64, ppc64, ...), and the third column is the build result. You can
click on the build result to see the build log. You can also click on the
platform name to see the packages built for that platform. On that page,
you can click on a link to go to the package repository. It shows all the
packages for that OBS Project and includes a repo file you can use to add
the repository to your package manager.

Once it's able to be used to build PASE applications, I think the amount
of easily installable open source software is going to soar. Right now,
every time someone compiles some open source for PASE, it's kind of a
one-off thing. It's not easy for them to share that with the rest of the
community. OBS basically solves that.