Introduction

We can build RPMs for the Ganga packages. This is currently a manual operation, performed by calling ~/ganga/release/tools/rpm_builder.py with the gangage account, but could ultimately be included during step 9 of the Ganga release procedure described here. As of April 2013, the RPMs are known to install successfully, but require further testing before being considered production-ready. We make use of the Python Distutils package.

Note that the rpm_builder.py script needs to be run from an SLC6 node. lxplus nodes should become exclusively SLC6 from 6th May 2013. There is now also a GangaSuite package available which contains the entire Ganga codebase. This still needs a bit of work doing

~/.rpmmacros

We need the following defined in ~gangage/.rpmmacros, otherwise RPMs will not be built.

%__os_install_post %{nil}
%_unpackaged_files_terminate_build 0
%_prefix     /opt/ganga/install
%debug_package %{nil}
%_binaries_in_noarch_packages_terminate_build 0

rpm_builder.py script

release/tools/rpm_builder.py is used to build the RPMs. Here's a quick summary of what it does when called with the -v 6.0.0 command line option:

• Export (not checkout) the specified Ganga release (not pre-release) from svn+ssh://svn.cern.ch/reps/ganga/tags/. Note that specifying -v 6.0.0 implies the existence of the SVN tag Ganga-6-0-0 in SVN. The release will be exported to /tmp/gangabuild or whatever directory is passed to the -b/--builddir option.
• Create the RPM pre/post install/uninstall files (these get executed during RPM installation/removal).
• Create the Distutils manifest template (equates to 'include all files').
• Since Ganga's layout is not entirely compatible with the assumptions Distutils makes, we have to create a temporary python/GangaBin directory containing the release, templates, bin directories and the LICENSE_GPL file. These are subsequently packaged in the GangaBin-6.0.0-1.noarch.rpm file.
• For each Ganga package (e.g. GangaBin, Ganga, GangaAtlas, GangaLHCb etc):
  • Write the setup.cfg and setup.py files required by Distutils.
  • Execute the distutils build command.
  • Record success/failure
  • Clean up RPM build workspace directory
• Print a build summary:

  ################################
  ################################
  ######## Build Summary #########
  ################################
  ################################
   GangaCamtology:              OK
      GangaSuperB:              OK
       GangaPanda:              OK
       GangaAtlas:              OK
       GangaDirac:              OK
        GangaSAGA:              OK
     GangaPlotter:              OK
     GangaService:              OK
       GangaRobot:              OK
        GangaTest:              OK
         GangaCMS:              OK
    GangaTutorial:              OK
        GangaLHCb:              OK
         GangaBin:              OK
       GangaGaudi:              OK
            Ganga:              OK
  

Within rpm_builder.py we use a set of python dictionaries to configure attributes that will end up in the RPM file. For example, we specify the RPM requirements of the Ganga packages with:

rpm_require_map = {
'GangaBin' : "python >= 2.4.3, Ganga >= "+this_version,
'Ganga' : "GangaBin >= "+this_version,
'GangaAtlas' : "Ganga >= "+this_version,
'GangaCamtology' : "Ganga >= "+this_version,
'GangaCMS' : "Ganga >= "+this_version,
...

The effect of this is that yum install GangaAtlas will automatically install Ganga, GangaBin and Python 2.4.3 (if required). We similarly populate the RPM description attributes:

description_map = {
'Ganga' : 'The Core Ganga package',
'GangaBin' : 'Contains the Ganga executable, release scripts, documents and temp
lates',
'GangaAtlas' : 'The Ganga ATLAS package',
...

setup.cfg file (auto-generated by rpm_builder.py)

Settings of note defined in this file include:

[bdist_rpm]
dist-dir = /afs/cern.ch/sw/ganga/www/download/repo/NOARCH
vendor = "Ganga <project-ganga-developers@cern.ch>"
requires = Ganga >= 6.0.0

[install]
prefix = /opt/ganga/install/python

The dist-dir defines where the newly created RPMs are placed, prefix can be overridden by the end-user to define a custom install location:

[root@dashb-ganga32 ~]# rpm --nodeps -ivh --prefix /tmp/junk /afs/cern.ch/sw/ganga/www/download/repo/NOARCH/Ganga-6.0.0-1.noarch.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:Ganga                  ########################################### [100%]
[root@dashb-ganga32 ~]# ls /tmp/junk/python/Ganga/
CLIP  GPI     __init__.py  PACKAGE.py  scripts  Utility
Core  GPIDev  Lib          Runtime     test

setup.py file (auto-generated by rpm_builder.py)

This file calls the Distutils setup() method, and passes a few pieces of info, such as the package name, version number, author info and text descriptions of the package:

        name = "GangaDirac",

        version = "6.0.0",

        ###DESCRIPTION###
        description = 'Description goes here',

        ###LONG_DESCRIPTION###
        long_description = "Long description goes here",

        url = "http://ganga.web.cern.ch/ganga/",
        author = "The Ganga Project",
        author_email = "project-ganga-developers@cern.ch"

Yum repository

You can either directly install the RPMs from their location at /afs/cern.ch/sw/ganga/www/download/repo/NOARCH or configure your Yum client to know about the repository (which is auto-generated by rpm_builder.py. Create a file at /etc/yum.repos.d/ganga.repo containing:

[Ganga]
name=Ganga repo
baseurl=http://ganga.web.cern.ch/ganga/download/repo/NOARCH/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Future developments

• Handle hotfix releases properly (including the internal RPM release version attributes being sane).
• At the moment we build the RPMs with the --no-autoreq option, which prevents the automatic calculation of RPM requirements for files within Ganga. For example, some files require Perl/C libraries. Thus we assume that the installation is being performed on a node with these available (e.g. a Grid user interface).
• External dependencies.
• Populate all RPM metadata attributes using python dictionaries.
• Figure out exactly which of these licences we should be using.
• Create an RPM that installs everything. Done: we create the GangaSuite package for this