[Pkg-gridengine-devel] Gridengine future

[Dave Love]

Laszlo Kajan <lkajan at rostlab.org> writes:

> Hello Mark!
>
> Dave says [1] he's working on a dpkg of the trac/SGE [2].
>
> I have no experience with either trac/SGE

You surely don't need experience of trac, and Son of Grid Engine is a
straight continuation of Sun Grid Engine.

> or the Grid Scheduler.
>
> But I would like to help with the effort and I offer my help.

If you're willing to put the effort in, and know a bit about dpkg, I'd
recommend trying to make a complete dpkg installing under /opt that
mirrors the RPM (apart from what's in what sub-package).  That will be
immediately useful to people running Debian as an add-on.  Then it can
be worked on to see if it can be brought into conformance reasonably
with Debian policy, or amalgamated with the current packing (without
being dangerous to upgrade, in particular).

> On 01/07/12 14:57, Mark Hymers wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> So, we need to make a decision about what to do with gridengine - we're
>> going to have to make targetted fixes (if any) for wheezy as the freeze
>> is past.

For one thing, there are important post-6.2u5 patches that were in the
old Sun "upstream" (including a security one that was rejected before).
However, there's essentially no security if users can't install in CSP
mode (for want of install scripts), which definitely needs to be fixed.
You also need to establish what fix you want for the recent CVE and
remove the other one, although I have a better fix for the remote
startup half of it if you still avoid the builtin remote startup.

>> For the future, the two options seem to be:
>> 
>> https://arc.liv.ac.uk/trac/SGE
>> 
>> http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net/
>> 
>> To be honest, at the moment I've no idea which of the two "forks" is the
>> one to go with.  Advice and assistance in rebasing the debian packaging
>> for post-wheezy (and possibly maintaining a backport to wheezy which I'd
>> be interested in doing) would be much appreciated.

SGE actually builds on Debian testing, which I don't think OGS will, and
is a large superset of the current OGS (at least in the version that to
be released shortly).  SGE also aims not to need patching for Debian, is
proactive about security and, as a free software distribution, takes
copyright seriously.  E.g. I'd expect Debian to worry about stuff from a
commercial operation that distributes GNU make (as the most obvious
example) "under the free SISSL license", and that flamed me for
contacting Debian about a security issue.