I am happy to release the article for the new squid 3.5.15+16
Until now the release was for the RPMs but I hope that from now on it will be much simpler to release every RPM.
The Fantasy Of Packaging
( A response to: Slamming Your Head Into Keyboard)
I was asked couple times “Why do you package?” and the simple answer is that I need it. But I must admit that it’s not because other developers and packagers doesn’t do a great job.
It’s just that I have couple specific systems that I operate and I need them to be up to date and until now I didn’t got the option to have someone that will take enough on his shoulders to make it happen in an Enterprise level.
And of-course it’s not that they do not want to, but since any Enterprise level distribution gives a good foundation for a very complex systems. When they develop and package they test and test and many other things until they can Insure themselves and their clients.
It’s as simple as this. If in some case you have found an issue, they should help you with it by the level of contract you have with them.
For example since I have a Windows licensed PC and a licensed SLED Laptop I expect them to release at-least security updates.
I know that every major Linux Distribution does it’s job in a very good way. I know it since I can see their src.rpm packages and compare between my work to them.
Basically if you are a young man or a kid, the example from the scene at Toy Story which handy is opening the presents packages at the party and then he finds “Buzz light year” in a big box would describe to some how handling a package shouldn’t happen in the Enterprise level businesses.
(from about 09:00 to 14:00 minutes in the movie)
An admin should rely on the packages and packagers in general but he needs to plan and understand the nature of the update in order to anticipate what could be done in the update of the system.
If you have a big system which clients are using you cannot just run “yum update xzy” because you want to update. And specifically with squid you need a strategy that will allow you to sort of “bypass” this specific server and use another server in the mean while.
On small scale it’s simply adding another of squid instance on the same machine or to access squid using a haproxy LB.
It’s not really requires magic just basic skill knowledge and responsibility, if you are lacking one of these you should invest some time to acquire theses skills.
If for some reason for your or others business the generic packaging doesn’t fit then you should understand that their aim was not you exactly but to another audience. And yes… it’s hard to see a package that does weird things like giving suid (chmod u+s XYX) to a file which actually is just a tiny script which should never run under root. But these things happens when the packager is novice enough to not understand they meaning of the work.
RPMs Automation: Here I come!!!
The squid-cache project and many others do not Package things in binary format and it’s important to understand that every Open-Source project probably have limited resources and goals and squid-cache is probably one of them.
All the sys-admins that uses my RPMs will probably enjoy them for a very long time but I have started to move from the manual hard labor RPMs creation to an automated one.
It means: That the packages will be pushed to the repository automatically for any squid release. My plan is to “certify” each of the RPMs or a release by a set of tests which are mainly manual rather then automated.
I haven’t decided yet what to do when a release fixed one bug but made another one but I will probably bump the RPMs version after basic testing.
And I would like to dedicate this amazing remix for all the amazing young IT industry mages that works many nights to give the Magical Internet be has great as it is now.
—www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFwoigs7Lhk
The above link was removed so another copy:
All The Bests,
Eliezer Croitoru