Les Mikesell wrote: > On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 07:25, Andy Green wrote: >>> hear them - the install everthing voices were universally dismissed by >>> those that didn't want it. >> What should have happened differently? Personally I would get rid of >> the installer completely, it's a pervy one-shot bag of weirdness. > > While I've argued a little for the usefulness of 'everything', what > I really think is needed is a simple facility to allow anyone > to 'share' their current configuration. That is, anyone who > has installed a set of programs that they consider useful for > some particular purpose should have a push-button-simple way > to export the yum repositories and list of rpm packages so > that anyone else could duplicate that exact setup with a > single command or equivalent push-button. Also to clone > machines, you would do a miminal install - just enough to > run yum and this automation package or even better make it > work from a bootable CD and do a complete install to match > an existing machine. Then we need to have a few dozen experts > upload their lists along with a description of the purpose > of the machines. Last week I was working on an RPM for a customer that configures their servers in one step. It has a bunch of dependent RPMs listed, like postfix, httpd, etc... if you install it with yum -y localinstall blah.rpm then yum brings in all those dependent packages the server needs for its role in one hit from the default-configured repos. But even so quite a large (unfortunately, proprietary) script was needed to run around configuring mail, aliases, mysql, etc, etc. Yum has a concept of a group, eg, yum grouplist but again I think the real way to attack these "box roles" is with packages, since RPM has everything that is needed. An example I can think of is a metapackage for mail with postfix+postgrey, just an RPM with the dependencies and a config script that runs post install, with all the good spamkilling options sed-ed into postfix config. So that would be a very thin package you might call postfix-spamhardened or whatever, but still it would install in one hit, force all its deps in and make a specific configuration action. RPM suits it well because it is happy to have complex scripts triggered by install and uninstall. -Andy
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