Getting people into Linux

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Fri Jan 5 14:00:00 UTC 2007


Tim wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-01-04 at 10:49 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> What I've always wanted - and have been too lazy to work on myself - is
>> a method where any number of systems could be easily configured to
>> track the changes in any other system with a publish/subscribe scheme.
>>
>> That is, one 'expert' would build and maintain a system optimized for a
>> particular type of use and his build tools would automatically package
>> his work for distibution - or he might just be assembling and assortment
>> of already available packages. In any case, without much extra work
>> it should be possible to make that exact set of packages selectable
>> by anyone else, in a way that updates and changes would follow the
>> master system automatically.  Currently this would take a hand-managed
>> yum repository for every instance and is so much work that it doesn't
>> happen.
> 
> Isn't Anaconda supposed to be able to provide for that sort of thing?
> You'd still use the same repos, but just a different installation
> script.

Yes, anconda does probe and understand the hardware differences
during an install, but it isn't involved with subsequent updates.
Kickstart can do an initial install of a matching set of packages
on different hardware, but then yum just updates the currently
installed packages. What I'd like to see is the ability to put
a large range of packages and package versions in the same
repositories and have an ongoing ability to track package and
package version changes to match a chosen master copy.  For
example, if the administrator of the master machine defers a
kernel update, pulls a few newer packages from the rawhide
repository, and installs postfix as an alternative to sendmail,
I'd like the tracking machines to offer to make the corresponding
changes on their next update run.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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