Tim:
> 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.
Les Mikesell:
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.
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.