[DRBD-user] URGENT Request for DRBD Developers

Gordan Bobic drbd at bobich.net
Sat May 24 01:13:31 CEST 2008

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


Art Age Software wrote:
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 2:14 PM, Gordan Bobic <drbd at bobich.net> wrote:
>> If you are afraid of looking after your own package collection, you really
>> should reconsider your calling as a systems administrator.
> 
> I never claimed to be a "systems administrator."

Yet you are administering systems.

>> Arguably, if you are _that_ concerned about stability, you shouldn't be
>> upgrading _anything_ unless you verifiably run into a bug. Blindly running
>> yum update is a recipe for disaster.
> 
> I agree. And I don't blindly run updates. DRBD 8.0.11 has a verifiable
> and critical bug with respect to dopd and failover handling. I want to
> specifically update the DRBD package + any dependencies and nothing
> more.

So build the RPMs from the tar ball.

>> So I seriously suggest you wake up and smell the coffee. Rebuilding DRBD
>> RPMs from the tar ball sources available for download is a trivial effort.
>> You spent more time writing the original email than it would have taken you
>> to build the rpm packages if you'd actually bothered to try.
> 
> Really, no need to be snippy. This is about more than the time it
> takes to download and build a tarball once. It is about the ongoing
> maintenance of a complicated system which is made easier by the
> availability of pre-built maintained packages. It isn't as if I am
> asking CentOS to add some new package that I need just to save me a
> bit of time. This is a case where something that was there (8.0.x
> support) was suddenly taken away, leaving those of us who were
> depending on continued support for the 8.0 branch in the lurch and now
> looking for other solutions.

I really don't see the problem - you identified an issue with this 
package. Fine. The sources required to build the rpms are available. So 
build the RPMs, install them, and be done with it. The amount of effort 
going into this thread seems to far exceed the effort of building the 
rpms you need 10 times over.

> I am seriously surprised that this has turned out to be such a
> controversial issue.

It's not controversial - you are making it into one. Most of the rest of 
us would have just built the later versions ourselves if we were as 
desperate for it as you claim to be and never even mentioned it.

Have you even bothered to download the tar ball and read the INSTALL 
file? If you did, you would know that all that is required to build the 
rpms is extracting the tar ball and running "make rpm".

So, to recap:

# wget http://oss.linbit.com/drbd/8.0/drbd-8.0.12.tar.gz
# tar -zxvf drbd-8.0.12.tar.gz
# cd drbd-8.0.12
# make rpm
# rpm -Uvh dist/RPMS/i386/*.rpm

5 lines. Count them.

A whopping total of 4 lines more than running yum update. You are going 
to have a hard time persuading most people that this is "too difficult", 
even for a really inexperienced sysadmin - especially since the 
procedure is documented.

> Managed package repositories are all about
> leverage.

No, they are about convenience.

> Sure, I and hundreds of other users could figure out how to
> build and maintain our own 8.0 builds. Would it not be better to have
> the CentOS repo do that for us? Isn't that its purpose? Seems to me
> that there is a really simple solution to this issue. Support 8.0 in
> Extras and 8.2 in Plus. Problem solved. Why the controversy?

You keep saying there is controversy, yet you seem to be the only one 
seeing it. The repositories are there as a reasonable base line. They 
are not the be all and end all of package availability. I don't think it 
is reasonable to expect that all the packages in the repositories will 
be the most up to date ones or totally bug free, or even fixed in a 
timely way. The repositories are there to get you started and help you 
out that's all.

Gordan



More information about the drbd-user mailing list