[ewg] Producing OFED binaries for end users

[Moni Shoua]

Hi,
The issue of ditributing OFED as a container of bimary packages was raised in the EWG
conf. call yesterday. We have some experiecne with it in Voltaire that we would
like to share.

Today, OFED is distributed as a container of source packages (SRPMS) along with an
install script. Container of binary packages looks pretty much the same but instead of SRPMS
that require compilation, binary RPMS are packed along with ation, the installation
script is much lighter than the one in the source package.
Although we wished that the installation script would be as simple as "rpm -Uvh *.rpm"
it is not enough.


So what else I we think is required from the installation script to do?

1. Package selection - compile and pack everything and let the user choose
	which packages should be actually installed. Selection can be to for
	a group of packages and not single packages to make the script frienlier.
2. Verification - binary RPMS are specific to the OS/ARCH where they were
	compiled. The installtion script should verify that the target platform
	is identical to the build platform. For kernel-ib this is essential.
3. Dependencies - not all dependencies are RPM dependencies (i.e. appear in
	rpm -q --requires). An example for that is open-iscsi that is required
	for iser.
3. Cleanup - remove (or at least check and warn for) previously installed
	OFED packages or other conflicting packages (e.g ofed-kmp in SuSE)
4. Dry run - after verification and selection allow user to check if
	installation would succeed (rpm --test). This is not an essential
	feature but it sometimes helps.
5. Force install - sometimes, from several reasons, installation succeeds only if
	the rpm command is run with the flag --force. Allow that.
6. Vendor scrips - Vendor scrips are extensions to the source package
	installation script. Their purpose is to allow different vendors to 
	customize the installation process as they wish (BTW, is someone else except
	from Voltaire use this mechanism?). Binary installation should take care of
	these as well.
7. Configuration - ifcfg-*, modprobe.conf, etc'...

This looks like it to me. Comments are welcomed.

Regards

 MoniS