It’s been a little while since I talked about SparkleShare; since then it has moved project hosting (here’s my fork) and there have been various changes – thankfully, updating the packages for the new version and to get it on Fedora 14 didn’t take too long. There are likely to be problems here and there with the packages – invitations don’t seem to work right now, but I haven’t tracked down that bug yet – but they should be mostly working. Please let me know if you’ve tried them and found any problems.

The situation with repos hasn’t really improved very much. At the moment I use mock to build packages; even SparkleShare (which is quite simple) takes about nine minutes to build in mock. It’s also quite a manual process, and if mock encounters errors then obviously the whole thing becomes very time consuming.

I really don’t understand why there isn’t a better solution than this yet. By using something like Koji, you can achieve much more automation – but Koji is hardly straightforward. And Koji uses mock, so is therefore not going to provide anything in the way of a speed increase.

Now, I understand why it’s involved, I get the whole clean root thing. But there needs to be something better, because the tools are a pain, and I only build for x86_64 and i386. If you’re building something in Fedora, you have access to the main koji and things aren’t too bad. Outside of that, you’re pretty much on your own and things get complicated, slow and/or manual quickly. If anyone has any better ideas than mock and koji, please please let me know…