Open Source Development

Is there an unified repository of linux compiled open source packages for ppc64le? (no IBM OSPAT or the platform repositories like RH, Ubuntu etc.), thx, R

That's a good question that seems like it would have an easy answer, but alas, no, the world is more difficult than it should be.

The general answer is "no", but there are places beyond each of the distros that have some content, e.g. Red Hat has the EPEL, Centos, and Fedora which all have more packages than just the base distro.  But beyond that the picture gets more difficult.  Building packages that work with one or more distros is extremely expensive (which is why companies arose behind each of the major distributions, other than perhaps Debian).  Maintaining packages and dependencies, publishing those packages, and making sure they are capable of being installed requires an enormous amount of general knowledge about which dependencies can be satisfied where, processes for updating to new versions or addressing CVEs is a full time job for many packages, and basically it exceeds the ability of a small team like ours by two or three orders of magnitude.

We are working hard to get more upstream packages to build their packages for Power like they do for Intel, but for most communities that is again a substantial testing exercise and being able to use the same CI that they are using for Intel is often just not possible for Power.  We have had some success with projects that use Travis CI, Jenkins, or even tekton/prow.  But most communities push back hard because of both business justification and availability of a CI environment.  With so many open source projects now using GitHub Actions, Power has limited capabilities here (which we are working to extend) and basically all of that leads us to a fall back position of doing as  many ports as we can, publishing information on container availability when it makes sense and there is one, and then trying to make that port accessible to end users via a set of build scripts (https://github.com/ppc64le/build-scripts) which enable you to easily build any package we've ported on your local machine.  You can also set some variables such as installation directory if you choose to install the package you built and get some limited configuration capability.  We are also working on a portal which will give you the ability to see all of the build-scripts and automatically build packages that are supported in our build scripts environment, even in some cases building top of tree.  That will be rolled out later this year if all goes according to plan.

So, sorry for the long answer of "No" but the build scripts and porting, combined with OSPAT are the means we have come up with to work around that limitation.  BTW, there isn't really something like this for Intel either, beyond the distro extended environments that I mentioned above.

Is there an unified repository of linux compiled open source packages for ppc64le? (no IBM OSPAT or the platform repositories like RH, Ubuntu etc.), thx, R