Re: Strategy for running BuildStream on RHEL 7.x?

[Sam Thursfield <sam thursfield codethink co uk>]

On 30/07/17 15:05, Justin Erenkrantz wrote:
> The upcoming RHEL 7.4 is expected to introduce official flatpak support.
> The latest public beta for 7.4 has OSTree 2017.5-3 and flatpak 0.8.5-2.
> Yet, I believe that it is missing bubblewrap.

I'm pretty confused how that would work ... flatpak is totally tied to 
bubblewrap. Perhaps they have bundled bubblewrap into the flatpak package?

It wouldn't be impossible for us to do the same as bubblewrap is pretty 
simple to build,

> Additionally, Python 3 is not distributed as part of RHEL proper - yet, it
> is part of Software Collections via rh-python35 (or rh-python34):
>
> https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/rh-python35/
>
> pygobject isn't included in rh-python35.  When trying to build that via pip
> on RHEL 7.4 with rh-python35, it leads to basically needing the full GNOME
> stack locally....which, if I had BuildStream, might be a tractable problem,
> but...well, turtles.
>
> Thoughts?  Could we perhaps leverage Flatpak/OSTree itself to distribute a
> version of BuildStream that would work on RHEL 7?  Or, do we have to treat
> RHEL 7 as an ancient Linux distro that doesn't support bubblewrap and
> sandboxing?  I'd hate to miss out on the OSTree advantages there.  Or??

That's an issue indeed.

It might be possible to rewrite the ostree backend to call the `ostree` 
CLI rather than pygobject. That would be an ugly thing to do in 
principle, but if it looks like it'd work then maybe it's a practical 
solution.

I don't know if `pip install pygobject` can actually be trusted; but 
building pygobject from source isn't too tricky, gobject-introspection 
devel headers and python devel headers are needed (and should be 
available in RHEL) and that's about it.

Sam

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Sam Thursfield, Codethink Ltd.
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