In the last week the focus of the work for the Jammy platform has been on building more packages for the DICE environment. Although this work is not strictly part of this project, having a more complete set of packages makes it much easier to test a range of configurations.

In previous projects we used an alternative inf environment which was intended to be like a DICE lite to keep the LCFG porting work as simple as possible. The problem with that approach was that, as we didn’t use it much at other times, it ended up requiring a lot of work to decide which bits of DICE configuration needed to be included for the new platform. We would then also have to do a full port to DICE later on. The differences between Focal and Jammy appear to be small enough that we can safely assume that the DICE environment will mostly “just work” on the new platform once the packages are available.

The DICE environment packages are split into 3 basic levels – common, user and graphical. For each level there are 2 package lists. There is one which is specific to the particular platform release (e.g. ubu2204) and a second which is shared between all variants of a platform (e.g. ubuntu). The release-specific list is used for packages that come from upstream and has upstream updates applied automatically. The other list is for locally built versions of software, it allows overrides of previously seen versions of packages and it does not get automatic updates.

The common packages are installed on all DICE machines, typically this includes many utilities which we need to manage and monitor the environment. The packages are added in the dice/dice_ubu2204_env.pkgs and dice/dice_ubuntu_env.pkgs package lists. All packages for this level have now been built for Jammy.

The user packages are installed on DICE machines which permit user access. For example, that could be via SSH, X on the console or XRDP. The packages are added in the dice/dice_ubu2204_env_user.pkgs and dice/dice_ubuntu_env_user.pkgs package lists. All packages for this level have now been built for Jammy.

The graphical packages are installed on DICE machines which permit user graphical access. For example, that could be X on the console or XRDP. The packages are added in the dice/dice_ubu2204_env_graphical.pkgs and dice/dice_ubuntu_env_graphical.pkgs package lists. The release-specific list for this level is currently empty and almost no work has been done on building the required local software versions.

Working through these package lists for a new platform always provides a good opportunity to review, tidy and improve the current situation. This has led to a few new package options being introduced (e.g. LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_REQUESTS_KRB added this week) and some package specifications moving between files. It is also a good opportunity to identify locally built versions of packages which need to be updated for all supported platforms.

It is noticeable that this part of the porting process is now significantly quicker than it ever was for RHEL-based platforms. This improvement is due to two main factors, firstly Ubuntu (thanks to Debian) has a much larger collection of ready-built packages and secondly our extensive use of lcfg-soy has made it much easier to generate package lists for new platforms.

Ubuntu Jammy Progress 3 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0