Kickstart Configuration Managers

[Adam T. Gautier]

Chris Geddings wrote:

>Can you frame out what the word 'distro' means in your vision?
>  
>
Distro is a linux distribution.  Redhat, Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, and 
Debian are all distros.  The 'vision' if it should even be called that 
is an easy way to customize those established distros and re-distribute 
a new distro.  These new custom distros would be more solution specific 
than the established distros.  Examples, Defining a custom desktop for a 
company, dedicated servers (email, webserver, application 
firewall(Zorp), CMS (/.), etc..), beowolf clusters, gamming distro, and 
the list goes on...

>I'm thinking one major problem you are going to see will center around
>packaging and distribution centric assumptions in packages.  I admit to
>being largely RedHat focused for the past few years, so I'm not sure how
>much of what I understand in distributions has been widely adopted
>versus rh centric. 
>  
>
Well, I have built distros from RedHat(Fedora)/Mandrake and run test 
around Suse.  They all use RPM and Anaconda.  Of course a package for 
RedHat probably will not work in a different base distro (Suse or 
Mandrake) but the solution I propose still provides some value.  For 
example, A user in company A defines a customized desktop distribution 
around Mandrake; another user whose company B uses RedHat could use the 
previous distro specification as a starting point(what packages, ks 
config, linux config, etc) to create a similar distro for hist company.  
Eventually, I think I can automate this process. I would also hope that 
each custom distro would be able to fall under existing supprt contracts 
with RedHat and Mandrake.  The big anomoly is Debian.  I will work on 
that one last but I am designing the solution with package distribution 
features so any distro that uses packages (rpm or apt) should be 
pluggable into the solution.

>I'm thinking about things like chkconfig for service management.
>Differing versions of rpm not always playing well together. Different
>distributions assumptions about what it is a package is providing and
>where files should go.
>  
>
Yes, that is exactly right.  To solve this the first choice in creating 
a distro will be what base distro to use.  That will limit which 
packages you should access.  But with all the packages in one place 
there is no reason why you could not try another distro's package.  This 
probably will not work but what the hell... If this idea catches on 
maybe enough people could push the big distro's to standardize, who knows...