Getting people into Linux

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2007-01-04 at 09:02 -0600, Randy Easley wrote:

> Agree 100% I don't see why we can't request what we want in an OS and
> let RedHat folks just compile it for us? That's my new goal... Call me
> in 5 years, I'll be a millionaire!  

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.  If it were trivial or just always happened as a side effect
of managing a system, I think a few hundred finely-tuned systems would
emerge and instead of everyone having to be their own system
administrator
they could just select one closest to what they want and automatically
stay up to date with the very best versions of everything.

Oddly enough, the people who are very interested in sharing code don't
seem all that interested in sharing administrative work even though
it could be just as easy.  Because of hardware differences it wouldn't
be quite as simple as exporting a list of installed RPMs and telling
yum to pull those from a repository that contains everything, but
most of the gunk needed to sort things out has already been somewhat
automated in the installer code so I don't think it is impossible
either.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com