Difficulty packaging in Fedora

[major]

I'm trying to package the SSM agent in Fedora, but it's incredibly difficult. Vendored dependencies are frowned upon in Fedora (but almost all of the dependencies are packaged already). Also, I can't get tests to pass on go 1.18 and 1.19.

Is there a CI environment where this software is tested regularly? I saw a Travis CI YAML file, but it doesn't look like it's going through the full build and test each time.

[sluggard76]

SSM Agent does not officially support Fedora.

Reference:

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/prereqs-operating-systems.html

[stewartsmith]

Amazon Linux is largely a downstream distribution from Fedora, and we index highly on "get it packaged in Fedora, and we can use that as the basis for including in Amazon Linux" when it comes to AWS software.

Thus, having the package available in Fedora, and meet the Fedora packaging guidelines, makes the job for Amazon Linux inclusion and maintenance significantly easier. It also means that the agent can be built in EPEL for use on RHEL, CentOS, and other OSs in that ecosystem.

We would love to see this packaging work being done upstream by the SSM team.

When it comes to specific issues with the bundled dependencies, a mail from @major from May of 2023 to some of the Fedora lists was seeking advice around the following dependencies and what should be done for packaging in Fedora. These appear to be of general concern, so resolving the concerns should be a priority.

• No commits since Jan 2017
  • 'golang(github.com/carlescere/scheduler)'
• No commits since Jan 2017
  • 'golang(github.com/cihub/seelog)'
• No commits since Sep 2018
  • 'golang(github.com/digitalocean/go-smbios/)'
• No commits since Sep 2016
  • 'golang(github.com/pborman/ansi)'

The aws-sdk-go and 'golang(github.com/xtaci/smux)' appear maintained, and 'golang(github.com/Workiva/go-datastructures)' has since had some commits in mid-May 2023.