Diskless workstations

[Wil Cooley]

On Wed, 2003-07-23 at 15:33, Paul Iadonisi wrote:

> 2) Is it reasonable to ask for a change to anaconda to allow for these
> rpms to be installed in this alternate root?  It would probably be an
> invasive change, as it's not currently done anywhere in anaconda, to the
> best of my knowledge, except that the actually installer *does* in fact
> install the entire distribution into an alternate root (after, how else
> would you do it?).  What's different is that now I'm asking for anaconda
> to switch gears in the middle of the installation and install a specific
> list of packages in a different alternate root.

I don't know if it can be done with Anaconda, but you should be able to
build the tree by relocating packages, if the packages are built
properly and permit relocation.  If memory serves, most don't however,
which makes relocation mostly useless in these cases.  I wonder if it
would be horribly broken to change that, perhaps by giving a default
Prefix of '/'.  This would let you more easily built a tree not intended
to be used localy.

I can see another benefit of being able to more easily relocate
packages: It makes building chroot jails much easier, esp for things
that depend on a number of libraries, such as ucd-snmpd.

I wonder if it would be possible to specify that a package depends not
only on a package name and version, but also that package being
installed in a relocated place?  I'm thinking of something like:

Requires: foo >= x.y; prefix=/var/chroot/bar, baz

(This is this inverse of the way we'd use commas and semi-colons in
English, but the comma is already in use and I can't think of a better
separator.)

Wil
-- 
Wil Cooley                                 wcooley at nakedape.cc
Naked Ape Consulting                        http://nakedape.cc
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*   Naked Ape Consulting                http://nakedape.cc  *
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