When is you talk? 1) How do appliances fit into EPEL? 2) Is RPM a requirement for EPEL? 3) If we deploy to EPEL, do all of the packages we depend on need to be in EPEL as well? 3a) If so, who is responsible for getting those packages into EPEL? 4) How is Fedora/Community prepared to help getting business applications into EPEL? 4a) Are there FTEs devoted to getting business applications into EPEL? 5) Do you need to go through Fedora to get to EPEL? Lee ----- Original Message ----- From: "Karsten 'quaid' Wade" <kwade(a)redhat.com&gt; To: fedora-isv-sig-list(a)redhat.com Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 11:08:37 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: what do you want to know about EPEL? I'm doing the final work on my presentation on EPEL[1] at the Red Hat Summit, and I'm wondering if there any questions you all have I should address? Generally, the approach is to describe what EPEL is (and what it isn't), and the various reasons why it is an important enough goal to warrant doing whatever it takes to get software in to RPM. Also, I'm going to touch upon some of the new work we are doing to enable ISVs to be successful -- this SIG, the other sessions at the Summit and FUDCon, etc. Let me know if there is anything you'd want to hear more of, less of, etc. thx - Karsten [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL -- Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr. Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org gpg key : AD0E0C41 _______________________________________________ Fedora-isv-sig-list mailing list Fedora-isv-sig-list(a)redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-isv-sig-list

I'll take a shot at this. Note that I don't speak for the EPEL Steering Committee. :) On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 16:18 +0100, Lee Faus wrote: I'm not sure this is relevant. EPEL is a repository of RPM packages built against RHEL 4 and 5. If your appliance can make use of those RPM packages, then it would seem that EPEL is a good fit for that appliance. Yes. Yes. Someone? Anyone? There is no requirement that anyone in particular do it, but they do need to be there. You can't put the cart before the horse, but we don't care who maintains the horse (as long as someone does). :) This is a good question. I suspect that individuals who are interested in these applications will be motivated to help. Some of the rest of us are just interested in helping FOSS companies get more exposure and are volunteering our time and resources to assist. We won't really have a good idea until we get the ball rolling forward. I'm not tasked for this as my only role as a FTE for Red Hat, but as the Fedora Engineering Manager, I'm volunteering quite a bit of my time to assist with this process. So, you've got at least 1/4 of 1. ;) So, the answer here is "sortof". EPEL uses the Fedora Packaging Guidelines, so if your package meets the criteria for acceptance in Fedora, it is also ok for EPEL. The maintainer will also need to agree to the Fedora CLA (or negotiate a separate corporate contributor agreement) and have a Fedora account, in order to maintain the packages. However: If you really don't want your package in Fedora, just EPEL, we can do that. I hope that helps, ~spot

Karsten, I'm a little late to the thread here, but I have a few thoughts to add. The approach that you've described sounds good. Explaining why one would want to do "whatever it takes to get software in to RPM" would be really useful for me. Likewise, it will be very useful for me to understand not just 'why' but also 'how'. The details of how to get software package X into RPM form are clearly beyond the scope of one session, but learning the high-level version of how to do this and documenting where to get further info would be great. I'd also like to learn clear definitions of what it means for a package to "be in EPEL" and to "be in Fedora". It seems simple enough... but then I try to explain it to someone else and find that I can't explain it precisely. If I can't explain it well, then I guess I didn't know it well in the first place. Actually, it's perhaps useful if I explain my position. Maybe others are in similar situations. My company has relatively little experience with Fedora, but we're very interested in learning about getting our JasperServer product into EPEL. I'd love to get a better feel for what skills we need to do this. I don't have RPM experience, what sites or books might help bring me up to speed quickest in this area? Our app needs an app server; how should I lookup what app servers are already supported in Fedora? Same for databases. I guess by the nature of your talk you would start with questions like, "What is EPEL?". For me, I'd certainly like it if you start with simple questions like this just to make sure that we all have the same foundational knowledge. I began by reading "(EPEL) is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement ..." While this is no doubt accurate, I didn't find it intuitively clear. Covering basic things like this in the session would be great. Regards, Matt Dahlman JasperSoft -----Original Message----- From: fedora-isv-sig-list-bounces(a)redhat.com [mailto:fedora-isv-sig-list-bounces@redhat.com] On Behalf Of Karsten 'quaid' Wade Sent: Thursday, 12 June, 2008 8:09 To: fedora-isv-sig-list(a)redhat.com Subject: what do you want to know about EPEL? I'm doing the final work on my presentation on EPEL[1] at the Red Hat Summit, and I'm wondering if there any questions you all have I should address? Generally, the approach is to describe what EPEL is (and what it isn't), and the various reasons why it is an important enough goal to warrant doing whatever it takes to get software in to RPM. Also, I'm going to touch upon some of the new work we are doing to enable ISVs to be successful -- this SIG, the other sessions at the Summit and FUDCon, etc. Let me know if there is anything you'd want to hear more of, less of, etc. thx - Karsten [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL -- Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr. Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org gpg key : AD0E0C41