Re: Writing a Spacewalk plugin for Apt-Get
Hi, Miroslav:
On Thursday 17 February 2011 18:36:10 Miroslav Suchý wrote:
> On 02/17/2011 06:11 PM, Šimon Lukašík wrote:
[...]
> I will try to step here as developer of Spacewalk and will try to
> enlighten our user story.
>
> Imagine classical line from apt/source.list
>
> deb http://some.url/ stable main contrib non-free
>
> Usually the repo is static and it is up to owner of that machine if he
> use main, contrib or non-free section.
>
> But Spacewalk provide dynamic repos. And admin (who centrally manage
> thousands of machines) in WebUI choose, which sections (we call it
> channels) that machine will use.
>
> So one day admin may choose main and contrib, but few days (or
> momements) later, he may add non-free and remove contrib. Whatever...
> And of course the in ideal world those changes in WebUI of Spacewalk
> server will not require change of source.list.
>
> I would expect having simple line:
> deb spacewalk://some.url/ stable
> or even:
> deb spacewalk://some.url/
> and spacewalk-apt-get plugin will receive list of sections/channels over
> xmlrpc and make it available in some initial phase of
> update/upgrade/install. Ideally in libapt so it will be available in
> aptitude/synoptis/whatever.
I'd say that it's usually a good design choice to be the service aggregator
(spacewalk in this case) to adapt to the individual services it tries to
aggregate, not the other way around.
I think to remember that managing configs is one of Spacewalk features. Why
don't hook the repository change to a push for a
new/modified /etc/sources.list.d/ file and then exec an aptitude update?
(that's at least what I'd do with, say, Puppet).
I think that would achieve your goals in a Debian-centric way and minimal
fuss.
Cheers.
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