[Ocfs2-users] Kernel independent OCFS2 packages for RHEL, Scientific Linux and CentOS

[Joel Becker]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 10:12:43AM +0200, Dag Wieers wrote:
> I would like to announce a set of OCFS2 kABI-tracking kernel module 
> packages for RHEL5, Scientific Linux 5 and CentOS-5 and kernels. These 
> packages have been introduced into the ELRepo testing repository 
> (http://elrepo.org/).

Hey Dag,
	Thank you for taking an interest in ocfs2.  You've always been a
great resource for folks working on el-like distributions and their
limited package archives.  I have a couple of questions, if you don't
mind.
	First, do you have any provisions in your package dependencies
to limit packages to certain update releases?  What I mean is, can one
package be installed and used against EL5GA, EL5U1, ..., EL5U5?  Or do
you have some mechanism to isolate a package to only a particular update
release?  I bring this up because there are often ABI changes that are
not detectable via modversions or any other automatic method we
currently have.
	A specific example is ocfs2 1.4, which will crash on EL5GA or
EL5U1.  They do not contain mainline commit
349457ccf2592c14bdf13b6706170ae2e94931b1 "Allow file systems to manually
d_move() inside of ->rename()", which ocfs2 1.4 requires.  This was
introduced in EL5U2.  No function signature is changed, so modversions
will not catch the difference.
	On another note, I was wondering if you have any language
mentioning that these are not the officially supported packages?  I want
to be clear here.  We develop ocfs2 to be used as widely as possible,
and we will never shortchange mainline or a packager like yourself when
it comes to help on ocfs2-users and other community forums.  ocfs2 is
something we're very proud of, and we back that to the best of our
ability.  I'm just want to have a clear story for our customers.

Thanks again,
Joel

-- 

"But all my words come back to me
 In shades of mediocrity.
 Like emptiness in harmony
 I need someone to comfort me."

Joel Becker
Principal Software Developer
Oracle
E-mail: joel.becker at oracle.com
Phone: (650) 506-8127