[PlanetCCRMA] drop outs with FC8 and latest CCRMA kernel

[Lamar Owen]

On Thursday 03 January 2008, bH wrote:
>  Lamar Owen wrote:
> >Having done some Ubuntu stuff (all the way back to Hoary Hedgehog), unless
> >you're talking about the LTS versions, ubuntu is as fast changing of a
> >distribution as Fedora is; every six months there's a release.

>  Yes, I was refering to "LTS" which I have as well as, 7.10, both are
> supported thru 2009  Good enough. 

F8 should be supported through 2008 and to early 2009.

>  Meanwhile, I have Fedora 6 on my laptop. 
[snip]
>  I however, refuse to re-install, reconfigure, tune and get 
> a stable system that works just because, Fedora, has the latest, greatest,
> out for all to beta test.

Whew, sorry for touching a nerve.

> As for, Fernando's, "pain" Rebuilding, CCRMA, every 6 or, 8
> months sounds more painful to me than converting from .rpm to .deb but, I'm
> not the one that has to do it.

The point is, once built for Ubuntu 7.10, it has to be rebuilt for 8.04, then 
8.10 (or whatever), and so on; you don't gain anything going to Ubuntu, as it 
is just as fast moving as Fedora is in terms of support; the repo would still 
have to be rebuilt every six months, as packages for 7.04 may or may not work 
for 7.10 (and packages for 6.06 will definitely not work for 7.10 or the 
upcoming 8.04).

But all of that is moot; PlanetCCRMA is currently an RPM repository, and the 
effort required for changing to be a Debian repository is significant; 
probably a lot harder than keeping up with Fedora (this is something I know a 
little bit about; I packaged PostgreSQL RPM's for Red Hat Linux and Fedora 
from 1999 up through 2004; I investigated Debian packaging, and it is very 
very different from RPM packaging.  Now, nando is a very bright fellow; I 
have no doubts he is capable to doing that.  The bigger question is whether 
he wants to do so.  

Further, there are already Debian packagers for some of this; you should 
really talk to them about updating their versions, rather than muddy the 
currently well-unified repository waters for Ubuntu.  That is really the 
major advantage over Fedora that Ubuntu has; Fedora's repositories have 
historically been somewhat fractured.

However, there is work ongoing to merge PlanetCCRMA RPM's into Fedora itself, 
which would lessen nando's work load.  This I'm sure he looks forward to!

Now, the latency could be due to other things set up in the PlanetCCRMA kernel 
and other libs versus the Ubuntu linux-rt kernel; don't know.  It would be 
interesting to see what the .config for the Ubuntu rt kernel looks like 
versus the PlanetCCRMA one.

I myself am having issues with the F8 PlanetCCRMA rt kernel; I'm running F7 on 
my main DAW desktop for now, but will be upgrading probably next week, as 
things are stable enough at this point for my uses.  I'll probably forgo the 
rt kernel for now, as my uses currently don't require the low latency.

I for one am thrilled with what nando has been doing for the last several 
years; many thanks, nando!
-- 
Lamar Owen
Chief Information Officer
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu