ISV Special Interest Group

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Welcome. This is the independent software vendors (ISV) special interest group (SIG).

If you are considering packaging your ISV software for Fedora, read Fedora for ISVs.

Mission

Goals:

• Create stronger bonds between Fedora and interested ISVs.
• Help ISVs resolved problems unique to their situation.
• Present lessons, content, and processes to the rest of the Fedora Project that help the adoption of open source software that is connected with ISVs.

How:

• Announce the SIG presence within the Fedora universe
• Get together on the mailing list
• Find out what problems we have individually and in common
• Seek out solutions to those problems
• Document in the wiki, teach others
• ...
• Profit!

Why should ISVs care?

For a longer article, read Fedora for ISVs.

For a longer, technical video, watch How to Build Applications Linux Distributions will Package.

• Fedora has one of the strongest and most sustainable communities of any Linux distribution.
• Fedora is the upstream for RHEL. You gain six to eighteen months testing that is before the next RHEL Alpha.
• Packaging requires the use of system resources instead of supporting your own copy of these resources.
  • The community (and Red Hat in RHEL) support and maintain those system services, so you can redirect engineering resources to work on tasks core to your software.
  • Security and bug fixes are handled.
• Imagine sending prospective customers, analysts, and journalists a USB key with your spin of Fedora + YourReallyCoolApp ... all ready to go, boot to a live instance, and run the real stuff.
• There is a repository called EPEL that are Fedora packages rebuilt for RHEL versions. This is a great way to distribute and maintain software designed to run on RHEL.
• When you package the Fedora way, you trade short-term pain (3 to 6 months) for extremely long-term gain (7 years.)
  • Packages that know how to use Fedora, and therefore RHEL, system libraries and common functions are friendlier to customers, easier for ISVs to maintain, and come with a compelling value proposition similar to Red Hat's.
• Invite your customers to participate or contribute directly on the next versions of your product. This is one of the biggest open source values for customers who take advantage of it.

Who

Karsten Wade, Community Gardener (Red Hat), is coordinating SIG activities.

JoergSimon, Trailblazer

What to do

1. List all your software dependencies
   • Every library, package, JAR, etc. required to build your code
   • You may list as a dependency software that you produce if you plan to package it separately
2. Check for dependencies already packaged in Fedora
   • http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji
     • Search using wildcard operators, e.g. '*commons-logging' finds the jakarta-commons-logging package
     • In the Packages section, search alphabetically; packages are typically derived from the upstream package name, e.g. a Perl module Apache2::SOAP is packaged as perl-Apache2-SOAP
   • This is the first vetting of your list
3. Take this vetted list to the SIG for common ground
   • fedora-isv-sig-list
   • Someone may be tracking the same dependency, chances to collaborate
   • This is the second vetting
4. Go to a topic-specific list to ask if anyone else is working on, needs, or wants to collaborate on the remaining dependencies
   • Java packaging - fedora-devel-java-list
   • All other packaging - fedora-devel-list
5. Be prepared to modify your code to use the Fedora version of your dependencies
6. Following the PackagingGuidelines, submit your packages for review
   • You may want to offer to trade reviews with other members of the ISV SIG

Resources for ISVs

Considering Shipping Your Product for Fedora?

Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) is the premier Fedora repository for packages branched and maintained for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and other Enterprise Linux derivatives.

For general technical discussions around everything from packaging to the direction of the distro, participate in fedora-devel-list.

The list for Java discussion on the same development and packaging topics is fedora-devel-java-list.

Other topical discussion lists are references on Communicating and getting help and listed on http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo.

Resources for SIG members

• Join Fedora, including creating a Fedora account.

Communication

• Email list -- isv-sig
  • Archives
• Weekly meetings on IRC -- not set yet
• IRC channel -- #epel on irc.freenode.net

References

This SIG was created on 02 May 2008 by LeeFaus and KarstenWade.