Hi,

I'm dabbling in writing a small Python application (further details below to provide some context). This application:

* Has no dependencies other than the Python standard library * Makes only sense to be installed using your distribution's package manager * Would initially support *only* EL8, although later on it could be expanded to support other distributions * Proper testing requires testing for each of the supported Linux distributions for the tool. The application should be packaged and deployed on a system running each supported distro and then certain commands need to be run to verify it is working fine

I would like:

* Making it easy for developers to hack in the package. They should be able to use any Linux system to develop. I would provide scripts using containers (podman/docker) to run tests and create packages for all supported distros. * Keep the packaging in the main source Git repo * Packaging should be fully automatized in CI/CD. All commits should generate packages for all supported distros (with a timestamped version) and push it to a repo (I would use COPR, ppa, etc.). Latest master should be easily installable using dnf, other branches should be easily installable for testing purposes. * I also like using Poetry for development (e.g. while the application itself would have 0 dependencies, development will require testing/style-checking/etc. and setting that up with venvs is friendlier to devs, instead of requiring the tools to be installed manually).

My questions (as a relative noob to RPM packaging- I've created and automated some RPM packaging, but mostly by winging it):

* Is any of the above a terrible idea I should reconsider? * Is there any project out there with similar goals doing things "correctly" I could "copy"? * pyproject-rpm-macros looks like something useful for what I want to do, can it be used on to package for EL8? (I only see Fedora branches)

Cheers,

Álex

------------------------- Context:

Software such as the EL8 MariaDB server RPM requires additional steps to be configured, such as running mysql_secure_installation. If you are using MariaDB as the back end database for an application (e.g. NextCloud), you will also typically want to create a database and a user for the application.

It is fairly easy to perform those steps manually. Under certain practices (such as container-heavy setups or very cattle-like deployments) it can also be easy to do that.

However, if you are using automated configuration management based on idempotency, such as Ansible, Puppet, etc. it is a bit more complex to perform that.

To cover that need, typically modules are developed for those configuration management tools which solve those issues.

However, a module developed for MariaDB/Puppet is not ideal for Ansible users, etc.

A better way would be to develop a command-line tool which can set up MariaDB using declarative configuration (e.g. a file that describes which databases/users/etc. are desired). Then this command-line tool can be easily executed using whatever configuration management tool. This tool could offer a generic way to implement idempotency (e.g. a --check flag whose return code indicates whether changes need to be performed).