RH Software Collections

Nick Carboni at Red Hat just reached out to me (via some pglogical-related discussion) about the Software Collections service RH is involved with. It looks interesting.

I've been keeping my eyes out for hosted build services and similar that might ease the maintenance of build machines and make it more practical to delegate access to subsets of packages. As you know I looked at Koji earlier but found it almost impossible to set up and maintain.

This one looks intriguing.

There's a certain similarity to PPAs with some alternatives-system integration.

It relies on COPR (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Copr, http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2014/03/11/intro-coprs/), which seems a bit like Launchpad PPAs + a build service.

Of course, it's all hosted infrastructure, not stuff we can run on Pg infrastructure boxes. I'm not overly troubled by that, since in the end it's still using a package tree, mock for builds, etc. If it goes away it's not the end of the world, it's not a conversion to a whole new package system.

Thoughts?

Even if SCL isn't interesting, I can't help but wonder if COPR would offer an easier-to-manage-and-delegate package build system than a bunch of hand-maintained VMs and package trees.

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