Hello, I just wanted to mentioned that with the release of Eucalyptus 2.0  we are now providing packages for Fedora. We have been providing a Fedora image for sometime now (albeit is a fairly old version of Fedora), and we are happy to be able now to provide packages for Fedora. Feel free to send me any comment about the packages, or any other Eucalyptus related question. cheers, graziano  http://open.eucalyptus.com/news/2010-08-24-eucalyptus-20-now-available -- Graziano Obertelli Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.
we would love to be able to coordinate with Fedora about Fedora's and our releases and web page (where to file bugs and where to find packages): are you the right person to coordinate with?
I maintain Fedora's euca2ools package, so I ultimately see all of the bug reports raised against it on Red Hat's Bugzilla . When people file bug reports against Fedora's package I usually forward it upstream and then try to backport the resulting fix into Fedora's package. While I typically wait for stable upstream releases before looking into adding features, I can try to accommodate RFEs as well. If you need something fixed that is the best place to send communications. For other cloud-related things this list is probably better. Where possible, please direct people to their systems' native package managers (e.g. yum or PackageKit in Fedora) instead of offering binaries via the Eucalyptus web site. This reduces confusion for me as a package maintainer since I don't have to worry about where someone's software came from, and for the Eucalyptus people since it's one less distribution to build for. At one point someone looked into packaging Eucalyptus, though it cannot make it into Fedora until all of its dependencies are broken out into separate packages and it doesn't bundle any JAR files. Since there is currently no Fedora package for Eucalyptus, this mailing list is probably the best point of contact for work on getting it packaged.
We already have one engineer looking into the euca2ools packages. He already reached out to the euca2ools packages and we hope to have only one package soon.
I assume you are referring to Mitch Garnatt here, who I contacted independently a few days ago. ;-) The notion of "only one package" is a bad idea for binaries since different distributions have different conventions and software versions. Having one spec file that supports multiple distributions is definitely possible, though. I discussed this a bit with Mitch. For licensing reasons I cannot simply provide you with a spec file that does what you need, though I am happy to provide feedback. Ideally, Eucalyptus will not provide any binaries at all, but instead have packages included in distributions' package repositories. This would render upstream-provided spec files and packages meaningless. For instance, as a Fedora packager I cannot use the euca2ools spec file included with its source because I must maintain my own spec file in Fedora's version control system.
How do you think we should proceed for Eucalyptus? Is it possible to have a 'mentor' to help us get Eucalyptus into Fedora?
note also that since Eucaluptus isn't a monolythic, single-system tool for managing clouds...it makes no sense to install absolutely everything, when most systems will only need a subset of the tools. You already mentioned that some of these things are being broken out, but just reiterating why "only one package" is far from ideal.