Kevin James wrote:
Hi all,
I'm working through getting Cobbler running on SuSE (specifically SLES 10). So far I've got it to build (version 1.3.4), using the OpenSuSE Build Service. The RPMs can be found here:
http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=cobbler http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=Koan
If you've got an account on OBS you can look at the project files:
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=cobbler&project=home:rin... https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=Koan&project=home:rincew...
Now on to my question. I've patched the 1.3.4 source from http://people.fedoraproject.org/~mdehaan/files/cobbler/cobbler-1.3.4.tar.gz so that cobbler check now does proper checks for services running when it's on suse. What's the process to feed back that patch for possible inclusion? For my build project I used "diff -uNr" but I've seen some other patches on the mailing list using "diff --git". Is this process documented somewhere?
Posting the patches to the mailing list is the way to go. diff -u 10 is acceptable, git-format-patch or posting a link to your own git tree to merge also works.
You can read more here: https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/PatchProcess
1.3.4 is a test release, 1.4.X (the stable release, we're using the old kernel versioning system) will be out Friday.
Cobbler looks very useful for a project I'm working on right now, and although I haven't got it running on SLES yet, I'd like to try and get any work I do to achieve that included back into Cobbler.
Outstanding, I'm very interested in seeing this happen.
Offhand, I think there are a few things it needs to be truly useful on SuSE:
-- "Cobbler distro add" works fine with "--breed=suse" (and folks have confirmed this) but "cobbler import" really would be more useful if it could import SuSE DVDs and rsync mirrors -- /var/lib/cobbler/kickstarts really could use a sample autoyast XML file to go with the various sample kickstarts. Cobbler auto-assigns base (minimal) installations based on the media it imports. This helps folks who don't initially know kickstart as they have something to start with. While AutoYast is definitely machine generated (it's XML, after all) having a base installation to use with systems that have just been imported seems helpful. -- Currently there's a facility for kickstart snippets that are very useful for RHEL/Fedora, but they probably don't work so well for Debian and don't exist for SLES. We may want to look at modifying the snippets content to contain "if this distro do this" kind of logic in a few places. In particular, some of the disk setup and network setup stuff would be very nice if it worked consistently across distros. We also have a few magic things like "$kickstart_done" (takes care of status tracking and preventing PXE boot loops, etc) that aren't expressed in SNIPPET logic -- for 1.5, we'll probably be trying to move those to snippets to make things consistent. -- "Cobbler repo add" is an abstraction around update mirroring and currently does a --breed=redhat (yum) and a --breed=debian(apt-mirror). I'm not sure if we'd want to add anything here. I'm also not sure how well packagekit could be leveraged for mirroring, but that may be a reasonable option that might save work for future distributions being added to cobbler. -- Anything required to make koan work for virtualization (--virt) and reinstalls (--replace-self). (I presume grubby is available -- the koan libvirt code should just work I'd think, if it doesn't, let us know)
None of the above are required, it's good to just have the RPM, but I think those would go along way to getting Cobbler more towards the "universal install server" we want it to be.
If you have any patches for the RPM spec files we'll also take those as a fair amount of folks like to build out of git.
--Michael
Cheers, KEv.