Re: Feature request ... or How to.

On 5/3/2010 1:06 PM, Seth Vidal wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, 3 May 2010, Les Mikesell wrote:
>
>> I've always thought this was a serious omission in all of the package
>> managers and that it would be really useful to be able to take any
>> arbitrary machine that might have been carefully tuned for a specific
>> purpose and 'publish' its package list. Then anyone else who wanted a
>> similar setup could tell his package manager to duplicate it without
>> having to repeat the work of researching and choosing the package
>> list. It would be even better if you could 'subscribe' to a published
>> list and track the exact versions installed on the master copy so you
>> wouldn't do updates until you knew someone had tested the new version
>> combinations already.
>
>
> The problem is not the pkg list - we have that - debug-dump gives you a
> good approximation - the problem is you need to couple that with configs.

Configs are sort-of handled by rpm anyway.  The missing piece is that 
there's not a clean separation of hardware/IP related settings from 
application preferences.  The RH-style extrapolation of local settings 
into stuff under /etc/sysconfig is a fair start but it would be better 
if it had some sort of inheritance hierarchy so you had another layer or 
2 of defaults with overrides. Then if you set something at the 
most-local level it would stay put even while you track updates from 
another source that affect values you haven't set locally.

> And by the time you've done that you're better off using kickstart +
> configmgmt - like puppet or cfengine or bcfg2.

If the goal is to save time by not having to research and avoid a whole 
bunch of stuff you really don't need to know about to duplicate a known 
working and recommended setup (and I'd think a lot of people might have 
that goal), setting up puppet/cfengine, etc. seems like exactly the 
wrong approach.  With them, you not only need to know exactly the 
configuration you want ahead of time but also yet-another programming 
language unlike any other to make it happen.  What we need instead is a 
package manager to do it for us, given a working example to pull the 
setup from.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    [email protected]