rpm .spec?

[solofoA45]

Hi,

Thanks for Flux!
I started experimenting with it, and am curious why there is .deb packaging,
but it seems no .spec is available available for flux-core.

The documentation mentions it:
https://flux-framework.readthedocs.io/projects/flux-core/en/latest/guide/build.html#packages
https://flux-framework.readthedocs.io/projects/flux-core/en/latest/guide/admin.html#installing-software-packages

Is it because:

• it is too TOSS-specific?
• the .spec file is located in the TOSS repository, rather than flux-core repository so making it available is manual and unconvenient?
• Flux can be deployed single-user or multi-user and currently only one case is covered in the .spec file?
• other methods, like Spack are recommended?
• other reason? Packaging should be done by distros, not upstream?

I would like to find the easiest way to ask sysadmins to deploy flux.

Regards

[wihobbs]

Hi @solofoA45, thanks for taking a look at Flux!

In #5524, @garlick shared some thoughts on why we don't have a portable specfile upstream in flux-core. Your comment implies you're building for debian -- you might find our debbuid.sh script useful, some of the core developers use that to build flux packages on their personal devices/clusters. There are notes about that script in #5101.

For configuration and deployment, the Flux Administrator's Guide has examples and helpful information. Note that if you're trying to deploy a multi-user instance you'll need flux-security compiled with the setuid bit.

Hope that helps! Some of the other devs will probably chime in a bit with more thoughts.

[solofoA45]

Thanks @wihobbs
I searched the documentation and the discussions, but forgot to search the tickets :-)
At this stage, I am only looking at single-user deployment.
I am building both on Debian and RHEL (and anything I can put my hands on).
Your comment made me think maybe I should have a look at alien (https://wiki.debian.org/Alien).

[grondo]

We've tried in the past to produce portable spec files for software and learned the hard way that spec files should probably be distro specific and in fact this is how build tools like koji are designed. For example, at LLNL we maintain two separate spec files for RHEL8 and RHEL9 and I can't imagine trying to make a single version the works on both distros.

So, your seem to have covered the answer in your first two bullets.

We do support building debs because some of us developers have debian based test clusters and make deb and install is a part of our development workflow.

[solofoA45]

Thanks @grondo
I was already aware that writing a portable .spec across RHEL/Fedora and Suse/OpenSUSE is
impossible except for simple cases, but I did not realize it could
also be the case for RHEL8 and RHEL9.
Anyway, I suppose that the compiler version requirement of flux-sched
would make RHEL10 a more reasonable target, waiting for new ways of
packaging to become the norm.