I’m not talking here about the second half of Golan-Globus productions (who brought you notable gems like Ninja 3: The Domination and Cobra, of course). I’m talking about the Grid Computing framework. So I’m taking a class at Boston University this summer about Grid Computing, and the prof. is going to have us work with the Globus toolkit. Now, since you can install the entire toolkit on linux (but only the java client on winders), I thought I’d try and ebuild it. Turns out, some people already have. Tried, that is.
OMG WTF. I mean seriously. How do you, as a package maintainer, deal with this. I’m talking about the upstream developers — how do they deal with this convoluted build system? Why package all the perl module dependencies with the actual package itself? People have heard of CPAN (gentoo users have it easy), you know. And poor Hanni (on the bug) — this is their first ebuild. My first ebuild was for yahoo messenger, and as simple as that was, matthewbk had to help me with it. So, shout out to Hanni for bravery. A big thumbs down to the globus upstream for an excruciating package (not the contents, just the way to install/configure the contents).
Someone on the bug suggested breaking the ebuilds up into separate components. I would urge the globus people themselves to release it as a suite of components and have mercy on distro maintainers who want to package the thing. The bug request has been in our bugzilla for two years now. Mainly because it’s a b*tch to package.
Update: I just found this article about someone’s exploration into grid computing. Good read.