Greetings friends,

First I want to thank @lupinix for all the work that was done to make fresh versions of INDI, kstars, and drivers available to the community.

I am happy to let you all know that Fedora packages based on recent git master branches are available again. I decided to use Fedora Copr to build and deploy RPM packages for kstars, INDIlib and 3rdparty drivers. You can find more information here:

Fedora packages

The ekos debugger is also available.


My goal for the Coprs are to keep them up to date with merges to master branches across kstars, INDI, and 3rd-party drivers. This is currently a manual process. I will be working on getting git hooks set up where possible to trigger new builds, and would like to change the package names to match the git hashes from the original source repos.

The goal is also to do this additional work behind the scenes, so that once you have set the Copr up, you should receive the latest packages without caring if I did it, or it was automatic.

The 3rd party drivers have been packaged in RPMs as of tonight, with a couple exceptions. There are a couple packages that require additional 3rd party libraries that are not included in indi-3rd-party. I will still work on these if there is interest, so please do not hesitate to send me a note and let me know.

One final note, as these are "bleeding", I would also like to open it up to the development community, and offer to build packages for any repos you might have with drivers that have not made it to the main stream yet. It will probably make sense to make a new Copr of "experimental-bleeding" nature for this. If this is of interest to anyone doing driver development, please let me know.

Finally, I am one person. My repos for the spec files and any patches are on github, and I would be very happy to add any developers to the projects that have an interest.

If anyone has questions, please let me know. If any packages do not work, please open a bug report against that repo on github, or let me know here.

Pull requests / Merge requests are always welcome.

Jim

Great job Jim! We finally have up to date packages for Fedora again. is this going to require a lot of maintenance on your side?

The heavy work is done now, I think. For updates, it is just increasing a version number and kicking off a new build. Even this part I am looking to automate with the webhooks and use of the git hash as part of the version string.

For example, today we have version 1.8.6.git-1, where the -1 will change to -2 for the next update. This allows a simple dnf update on systems using RPMs to grab the latest. The next step is instead to make this look like 1.8.6.<git short hash> for the version. The short hash should come directly from the upstream master. If I can achieve this, then everything becomes automated. A push to master means a new set of corresponding packages for that repo.

JIm

Just a quick update on this. All indi and indi3rdparty drivers are now being built and packaged in the Copr repositories automatically. The builds are tied to merges to the repos, triggered with webhooks, and made available as soon as the build is done. For drivers, this is just a couple minutes, and for indilib it is about 7-10 minutes from the time of the merge to master.

Kstars is getting set up, but will take just a little more work. For this moment, I am monitoring git and triggering a build. This will be automated in the near future as well. Ekosdebugger, if it has changes, will also get a fresh build automatically.

All packages now have a date stamp on them, so you will know exactly how old it is, and therefore can easily trace it back to the git hash for any debugging. If anyone would like, I can also set up branch builds quite easily for testing new drivers, for example.

Please let me know if anyone sees any problems. It looks like there are about 40 installs using the new repos already, so that is great to see.

Thanks,
Jim

The RPM package for stellarsolver is now available in Copr. The documentation here on the website has also been updated. If you install kstars-bleeding from Copr now, and you have added the Copr repository for stellarsolver, it will automatically pick up stellarsolver for you as a dependency.

Docs: Get Fedora packages

A bit of an update. I was able to create ARMHF builds for Fedora 34 and Fedora Rawhide, including stellarsolver, INDI, kstars, and ekosdebugger. You can find them at the same location listed above.

Enjoy!

Jim