Distribution packaging? (was: [ewg] Re: [ANNOUNCE] librdmacm release 1.0.7)

[Roland Dreier]

By the way, the current status of my Debian and Fedora packaging efforts
for userspace code that I use is the following:

    libibverbs:
    libmthca:
    libmlx4:
    librdmacm:
        Up-to-date packages included in Debian and Fedora.

    libipathverbs:
        I have Debian packaging prepared and I will probably submit it
        for inclusion in Debian soon.  The spec file looks like it would
        only need minor changes for Fedora inclusion and if I have spare
        time I may work on getting it into Fedora (I use Debian for
        development but I'm not a Fedora user so my motivation for
        working on Fedora packages is not that great).

    libcxgb3:
        Current tarball release (1.1.4) is a snapshot of the raw
        development tree, not the output of "make dist".  This makes
        packaging ugly.  I have Debian packaging ready and the spec file
        looks clse to what is needed for Fedora, so once a good release
        appears it shouldn't be too hard to get into distributions.

    libnes:
        No tarball release available.  Same implication as libcxgb3: I
        have Debian packages ready to go once a good release appears,
        and the spec file probably wouldn't need too much work.

Do other people find this work useful?  I personally really like being
able to install a new system and get up-to-date userspace packages
without having to mess around with OFED or building by hand, and of
course being able to do "aptitude upgrade" to update the versions on a
system is very nice.

If there is value to this, then it would be nice if I could get
"official" releases made with "make dist" from the libcxgb3 and libnes
maintainers -- this makes the job of getting packages into the upstream
distribution much simpler.

Also, since I am not much of a Fedora person, I wouldn't mind if other
people claimed the job of getting packages into Fedora.  There is
excellent step-by-step documentation at

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Join

 - R.