From release notes for FC5T3 (web)

[Andy Green]

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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