Re: dpkg modification: non-interactivity

[martin@internet-treff.uni-koeln.de (Martin Bialasinski)]

>> "WA" == Wichert Akkerman <wakkerma@cs.leidenuniv.nl> writes:

>> This also won't address dpkg asking if it may overwrite a conffile.

WA> Interesting point. The problem here is that you can't really set
WA> this centrally for a cluster since each machine that uses the
WA> central configuration might have different config-files. I'm not
WA> sure what to do about that..

dpkg should assume "no" (this has to be implemented somehow). The
configfiles are generated (or copied from a central repository
anyways).

At the university, I use the following scheme to keep a bunch of
Windows 3.1 boxes updated:

The Novell loginscript does sync the box with a central tree, thous
giving the user a clean environment.

First, it copies the files from /mirror/all/..., then the specific
files in /mirror/<ip-address>/...

[ deleting files etc. is also done ]

So for debian, this would mean: after installation, it would call a
script update-config, which will fetch the config files for this
specific box.

To make the creation of the computer-specific tree of the mirror
easy, we need a database, which would save the specific
information like ip-address, hostname, x-server etc. Then we can
script the creation of config files which differ only in some minor
thing (like hostname).

Ciao,
	Martin