4Suite 1.0b1 via yum?

Dave Pawson was asking how to grab 4Suite using yum. I'm still yet to post a follow-up based on Dave's earlier question, and thanks to Eric Gaumer for carrying on the thread in some of the direction I'd planned, and I'll try to get back to that topic today. Anyway, Dave and I weren't really successful getting 4Suite 1.0b1 yum. I'm posting here for reference to our journey, and in the hopes that someone can help.

I use apt rather than yum, so i had to remember the right yum mojo again, but I started by looking at what I had on my system:

# rpm -q 4Suite
4Suite-1.0-3

OK. That's odd. 4Suite 1.0 is still in beta, so that's a strange version number. So I found out the real version number:

# rpm -ql 4Suite | grep "Xml/__packageInfo__.py$" | xargs grep

"^version" version = '1.0a3'

Ah. I see now. They omitted the "a" part. Well, it's one 4Suite release behind—not bad, but there are so many improvements in 4Suite 1.0b1 that you should really get the latest.

I went looking on google and found a promising candidate, 4Suite-1.0-8.b1.i386. This looks like it's in fedora-devel, so I tried looking at how to add that repository. I found help on aaltonen.us, where you can find the following yum repo spec:

[development] 
name=Fedora Core $releasever - Development Tree
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/fedora-core-rawhide
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

I handed this off to Dave to try out (turned out the magic incantation is yum install 4Suite.i386). But the resulting chain of dependencies was way too far out on the bleeding edge. Dave was seeing updates to the likes of "perl, python, libxml, mysql kde, gnome, k3b the list goes on!":

I can't see that this is a true dependency from 4suite Uche?
Error: Missing Dependency: libdb_cxx-4.2.so is needed by package openoffice.org-libs
Error: Missing Dependency: libedataserver.so.3 is needed by package openoffice.org
Error: Missing Dependency: libebook.so.8 is needed by package openoffice.org
Error: Missing Dependency: gcc = 3.4.3-22.fc3 is needed by package gcc-g77

Oops. Ouch. The problem with the RPMs seems to be that fedora core is still testing the transition from 4Suite 1.0a3 to 1.0b1, and that's quite understandable. I look forward to seeing the more recent version in fedora core base.

At this point I advised David to ditch yum, just use the .src.rpm from the official 4Suite download and use rpmbuild to make himself a package. That also turned out to be a dead end: the spec file in the 1.0b1 release appears to be borked. Our fault. Ay ay ay. One of those days. I'll make sure it's fixed before the next release.

In the end Dave installed 4Suite from source, using "setup.py install", and all was well. I should have just told him to do that from the start.

Meanwhile, some notes from the fedora-devel 4Suite-1.0-8.b1 RPM.

The description is way out of date. I think it's 2 years old or more. For one thing 4Suite hasn't included 4DOM in aeons. I suggest the Fedora maintainers take the description from 4Suite.org.

Also, it requires "PyXML >= 0.7", but we dropped that requirement in the 4Suite 1.0b1 release.

Finally, it says "python-abi=2.4" is required. I suppose that might be FC3 maintainer preference, but I did want to mention that Python 2.2.3 is sufficient (though we do recommend 2.3.5).

[Uche Ogbuji]

via Copia
7 responses
I hope you are happy with Debian packaging of 4Suite. Versioned 0.99cvs20050408-2, upstream version 1.0b2, CVS snapshot of 2005-04-18, supports Python version 2.2/2.3/2.4.



You can also review the description and dependencies:

http://packages.debian.org/testing/python/python-4suite
Yes.  Raphael Bossek is a great packager.  He keeps engaged, is patient, and yet bugs us to fix things that need fixing.



Ubuntu is definitely a temptation for me to try Debian again.  The main obstacle is scrounging up the time to make such a big switch (for me).
Hi,

I had a lot of headhaches in try to install my

personal version of python on a machine without

being root (is a managed server).

So I ended up in creating pyvm a java-like python http://pyvm.sourceforge.net .

It contains a lot of packages already and has a compilation script that can be tailored (right now is tested on suse 9.2 and

fedora3).

I doubt any server administrator will ever use yum or any apt derived tools in order to upgrade dinamically/update a machine because the risk of breaking binaries is simply too great.

I hope that this little advertisment will be useful:)
pyvm is a useful idea, but people can also install python and 4Suite very easily in their home directories.  See, for example,



http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/2005-04-16/Installing
Very true, but pyvm is mean to not require any compilation saving precious time.

Moreover it encapsulates a well defined set of components in a non invasive way.

I doubt  java would make any impact if it was released as source code requiring compilation each time you need to run a jar file.

The same is true for almost any major application: openoffice, firefox and several different ones.

That something I felt was still missing in python.

To become an enterprise language I think that would be a good move.
This is UNIX.  Compiling things (given clear instructions) is just a skill every user should know.  As an example, almost every version of Linux out there comes with Python and 4Suite.  But if you decide you want a different version of either (the case that prompted this blog entry), it's easiest to just type in the few commands it requires to build the package just the way you want it.  pyvm wouldn't have helped me or Dave one bit.  All pyvm is doing is providing a different distribution.  Again it's fine if it exactly matches some user's need, but if they need any deviation from  what you provide, or the options with which you provide it, they still have to build it the way they want.



Good luck with pyvm.  If that meets some users' needs, good for you.  I suppose we could decide to provide some "sumo" distribution of 4Suite which included Python and all that, but I honestly don't anticipate much demand for that.  I'd rather leave distribution to the distributors.
>This is UNIX ....

I could not disagree more on that particular point (and I have countless nightmare stories about this point).

Anyway I developed pyvm to fit my selfish need: I'd like to share (in the opensource tradition) something with others, maybe saving them some time and that is it.

The discussion is now sligthly out of topic:

It might be appropriate to divert this "flame-war" somewhere else more appropriate.