On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 01:16 +1030, Tim wrote:
>> 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.
For a follow-the-leader thing, wouldn't you be better off if the leader
was to make a list of things to be pushed onto the followers, manually,
rather than them just copying it blindly? Else one little experiment
would flow onto everything else.
Yes, I was leaving a few details for the implementation. I'd expect
the master admin to do some sort of 'bless' command after his
changes to make them available for propagation - or at least for
the master machine to still be operational after the changes are
completed there (and a reboot happens for kernel updates).
I could imagine a nightly cron job on clients that looked for a list
on
the server of things to be done with the yum equivelent of rpm -Uvh.
With some sort of serial number (ala DNS records), so a client doesn't
try to do it twice.
I picture it as a slightly more intelligent version of a yum update
where revision levels are stated explicitly and a repeat would not
make any changes. It could even permit a mix of explicit revision
control on certain packages managed at the master and local additions
that do a yum-style "track the latest in the repository" although
then you'd have to handle dependency conflicts manually. You can
get somewhere close to this with some invocation of 'rpm -qa ...'
followed by telling yum to install that list of packages on another
machine for the initial setup, but you can't track changes that
way.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell(a)gmail.com