Most of my works relate to grid technology and AccessGrid is one of them. I would like to install AccessGrid on my Ubuntu laptop in proper way. I mean to install AccessGrid via standard deb package plus a repository for next installation. Unfortunately, I have not found any sources for rebuilding on Dapper. In fact, I found ones for Hoary and Sarge. Anyway, there is no Debian sources for rebuilding at all. Well, it seems there were only VisLab at University of Sydney and VisLab The University of Queensland interested in running AccessGrid on Debian and Ubuntu.

The biggest two problems of compiling AccessGrid on Ubuntu is its dependencies and its building procedure. AccessGrid requires Globus, pyGlobus, (patched) pyOpenSSL, and many more. Most of them are rarely used so there is no existings packages on Ubuntu and also Debian. The AccessGrid development team solved this problem by providing all sources in CVS with symbolic links to indicate dependencies of such building requirement and a bunch of build scripts written in Python. I do like Python but what AccessGrid did seems to not conform standard of distributing Python library, Python program, and packaging softwares of each Linux distribution at all. Sadly, I guess that there are so many developers in the team and each of them has a favorite Linux distribution or development platform, e.g., Fedora, Gentoo, Mac OS X, and Win32. So AccessGrid must be compilable on all of those platforms. Since the dependencies are so long, they decided to develop set of Python scripts to automate this task. Nice idea. By the way, it turns out that the building process changed quite often or developers moved to new development platform so often. As a result, only some build scripts are up-to-date.

I don't like above idea because it would be easier to follow standard of each platform to simplify building process. Instead of automatically packaging, I prefer semi-automatic approach where I build necessary packages manually. Then the AccessGrid itself could be automatically rebuilt anytime.

Now I have gpt 3.0.1, globus-accessgrid 2.4.3, python2.4-pylobus 1.0.10, python2.4-pyopenssl-ag 0.5.1 cvs20060627, and python2.4-fpconst 0.7.2. Next step is vic, rat, and AccessGrid itself.

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