[PlanetCCRMA] FC5 update question for Fernando

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 02:35 -0700, Tracey Hytry wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been playing around with fedora 5, installing a lot of stuff from the 
> fedora extra's, and usually having a fun time with it.
> 
> I've installed all of the ccrma packages and the edge kernels, and everything 
> seems to be working quite well.  I have the fedora extras and ccrma repositories 
> set up to use with yum and yumex.
> 
> The question I have is that when I do the command line "yum update", it wants 
> to update the three jack-audio-connection files from -0.101.0-02.cvs.rhfc5.ccrma 
> to -0.101.1-9.fc5 and I am wondering what to do?  Because I tend to use yumex, 
> I updated other things but left the jack stuff alone.

Jack is one of the first "crucial" Planet CCRMA packages that has made
its way to Fedora Extras - but regretfully not directly from the Planet
CCRMA repository or spec file. It is an enabler package in the sense
that many other packages can now make it to Extras as they need Jack.
Regretfully somebody else had already submitted it to Extras so somebody
else will be maintaining it. That person never even communicated
directly with me about the package, I would imagine that I would have
done that in his place. Instead there was a long period of some wheel
reinvention - I only became aware of that submission recently. Oh well. 

> Maybe I'm a little paranoid(something to do with tying to stay on top of all 
> of the security and anti-intrusion stuff) but I try to keep the audio stuff 
> on the machine as close as I can to the ccrma sub-distro.  I feel that at 
> least if something dosen't work I can present a decent bug report to the mailing 
> list.

You can do the same thing using redhat's bugzilla, if need be. 

> So, is it safe to update something as important as jack to a non ccrma package? 
> Is there any way of getting the packager's info of the new jack without 
> downloading it first?  Yumex dosen't show any info of who put it together and 
> what it fixes(if needed).  I know that the jack packages that you(Fernando) 
> have put together have patches to fix some of the deeper issues with some 
> of the higher end machines, and I wonder if the "updated" non-cvs/non-ccrma 
> have these fixes in them?

It does have the Athlon showstopper patch for dual core TSC issues (I
did give them feedback on that and insisted on it). It does not have
(AFAIK) my patch for a higher SCHED_FIFO priority that is inserted at
the right slot for the ones that rtirq chooses for the interrupt
priorities. You can always specify that manually when you start Jack. 

I think the package is based on the latest "stable" release of Jack
whereas mine comes from the clockfix CVS branch - in some respects newer
than the one released to Fedora Extras. Obviously the "-9" release (and
that comes from a long prerelease set of "releases") overrides my
"0.cvs" release so from the point of view of rpm it is "newer". I think
the clock fixes for dual core Athlons are now part of current CVS so it
is probably time to release a new version at Planet CCRMA. 

This is the "history" of Fedora Extra's Jack package:
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=183912

> I already know that certain other things like the alsa libraries have been 
> updated from their original install, and the alsa-* packages have all sorts 
> of varying degrees of levels.  I'm just wondering if having the fedora 
> extras(and updates) repos enabled is ok for a stable working audio production 
> machine?

It should be fine. We'll see as time goes by. I'm tracking extras now as
more and more audio packages are incorporated into it. 

One potential problem is that new guys that have not packaged audio
stuff for years like I have will not be "inspired" by the spec files I
have put together and will make the same mistakes I did a while back. On
the other hand they may (and probably will) do a better job. Who
knows :-)

Interesting times ahead...
-- Fernando