[Pkg-gridengine-devel] Going for 8.1.3

[Laszlo Kajan]

Dear Dave!

>> My feeling is that at this point, as you are close to the release of
>> SofGE 8.1.3, perhaps you could coordinate the 8.1.3-related
>> effort. You fix problems upstream, and little patching goes to the
>> Debianization anyway, so I guess the best we can help you now is by
>> doing builds and tests and letting you know how those go.
> 
> Yes.  Test builds on all the Debian architectures would be useful for
> one thing.  I'm not convinced by the current scheme with a wrapper
> script, and I don't know how that works in practice.  Obviously I
> haven't tested running the packaged version with the missing wrapper...

I can upload to 'experimental', and have the test builds. I - with help from Tim - can test the packages we build. But.

I am not prepared and experienced enough to address the rest of the issues you bring up. Mark Hymers, who did the original packaging for Debian,
does not seem active now. I am just a user of SGE, and not a sophisticated one to that. I hope others on the team can comment, or that we can
recruit new team members from Debian, who can.

> I'm not at all sure the current conflicts and replaces tags are right,
> and the setup with alternatives for DRMAA and names clashes with Torque,
> for instance.

This also is something beyond the depth of the issue I can commit to investigate.

> There seem to be fundamental issues with a distributed system like this
> in Debian, apart from policy making it rather difficult, for instance,
> to run shared-everything clusters.  I can't see a way to make automatic
> updates work sensibly.

Probably this is why the Debian community is quite cold on gridengine. Without more expert (than my) contribution from Debian Developers/grid
experts, I am starting to see that gridengine may not continue to be maintained within Debian.

There's an expression in Hungarian: 'He ran his cleaver against a tree too big'. I feel this way a lot these days, attempting to (help) maintain
gridengine.

Best regards,
Laszlo