ELT Development Environment

The ELT Linux Development Environment (DevEnv) comprises a collection of hardware, software procedures and tools for the developing, testing and debugging of software components for the ELT. It has to support largescale and long-term maintenance of software. To guarantee a correct and proper integration of software components for the ELT, all participants in the development effort (software developers at ESO and external contractors) must conform to the same rules. Using the same version of the DevEnv is one of these rules. As technology improves and requirements changes, the DevEnv functionality will tend to change. To accommodate these changes newer releases of the DevEnv will become available. Traceability of these changes is a must, therefore DevEnv releases will be subjected to strict configuration control.

The document describes a flexible, simple and robust installation process of the latest release of the DevEnv:

1. It is flexible because the OS can be installed on a large variety of HW: on bare-metal chassis or on virtual machines; on light system or on very powerful servers. There is only a minimum set of HW requirements which is granted almost by all systems.

2. It is reduced to a short sequence of commands to be executed immediately after the installation of the OS. It can be performed by System Administrators who may have to maintain it later; or by end users who may want to have their own copy of the DevEnv installed on light systems, like laptops or virtual machines.

3. It is robust because it is written on a single script, based on PUPPET, which guarantees the complete and correct installation of the DevEnv. This script takes care of the download and installation of the remaining software packages; configuration of services and the creation of user accounts. Another script can be used at any time to verify and certify that the system is complaint with the current release of the DevEnv.

  1. Updates are trivial.

The DevEnv installation relies on a RPM repository maintained at ESO that guarantees that all software packages required during the installation process are available.