Color me impressed

Ok … I had gone off on the OFED build/installation scripts for v1.3 and before, noting that it required that I do lots of patching, as the build environment … basically wrappers around rpmbuild, made distro specific assumptions. I don’t have a problem with using rpmbuild. RPMs annoy me in general, as they have been little more than a moving target, and sadly rendered effectively incompatible across distros. Not just the binary ones, but the source RPMs are very hard to build on any but the target distro. Which makes software portability… at least as packaged in RPM format, a challenge.

A carefully constructed RPM, one built the way the original system was conceived, without resorting to some of the “features” that have emerged, will often work correctly on most distros. I don’t have a problem with them. But massive dependency radii, and broken/incompatible spec files … it grates on you. Add to this rpm debugging that … well … does not exist in any effective manner … not even printf’s … and a distinct lack of documentation … Yeah, its a mess. At best. Tarballs and install scripts are in many cases, better solutions. Sad. Well, along comes OFED-1.4. I wasn’t expecting much. I pulled it down, and thought it was a good time to start hacking the install.pl script (as I had done to the previous releases in order to fix them for Ubuntu/Debian and OpenSuSE/Centos). Started the build. And it just worked. Cudos to the OFED team. I am happy that you pulled the distro specific stuff out of the basic build. RPMs … I can live with. Broken build environments annoy me. But it works. Quite well at that. Good job folks, good job.