El Tue, May 17, 2005 at 04:44:34PM +0200, Holger Levsen va escriure:
> The three main technical challenges each CDD faces are:
>
> 1. select the packages for the CDD
> 2. tweak them (adapt the package configuration to the CDDs need)
> 3. create a package archive and install media
[...]
> CDDs need five layers of configuration (upstream defaults, Debian maintainer
> changes some, CDD change some more, local admins do changes and user
> changes), where Debian traditionally only has dealt with four.
>
> Common tools and methods to achieve this fifth layer, CDD tweaking, would be
> useful and are the aim of the CDDTool development.
Yes, that is one of the goals, but it goes after the other two also, as it
tries to define a common way to declare the package selection and provide
tools to create a partial archives from the CDD description and use them to
build installation systems based on d-i.
> Besides tweaking the configuration to the needs of the CDD (without breaking
> the upgrade pathes provided by Debian and without breaking the choices the
> local admin made to further tweak the CDD configuration to her needs), CDDs
> need a standardized way to select the packages which are part of their
> distribution (which should be based upon debtags and will be explained in a
> minute.)
I've read all your mail and I don't see why it has to be based on debtags. I
see the interest on debtags as a simple and powerful way to categorize
packages, but what is the advantage of using debtags instead of the
description file I've proposed?
I feel that the contol-like syntax is easier to use by developers, as they
are familiar with it and, unless I'm missing something, it is much easier to
declare package dependencies using the control file format (it has the same
syntax that the rest of the Debian system uses).
> Then, there is also FAI (http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/), which a.)
> works on the CDDs _and_ local admin "tweak level" and b.) does much more: FAI
> is a complete framework which covers all three aspects of CDD creation
> mentioned above as FAI was created as a tool for local admins to manage a
> specific (to the needs of a local admin) system infrastructure.
>
> With FAI it's possible to tweak packages (using debconf, cfengine and
> traditional custom-made scripting), FAI also provides a class concept (which
> is used for selecting packages and configuration and much more), means to
> select packages and to create a installation media. So currently FAI is not
> really a complement to CDD but a different, standalone tool.
I already said that I was going to look at FAI but have not had the time to
do it and nobody on the CDD Dev Camp had experience with it, I promise I'll
take a look at it before continuing the work on the cddtk; I would be happy
to learn that I can use FAI for the cdd toolkit and avoid writting new code,
it's a lot faster to do.
[...]
> After this rather long prologue, now let's dive into the world of debtags,
> focussed on being able to select / define the packages for a CDD.
[...]
> What should be covered by a policy ? For example: the namespace tags use,
> common facets of tags, criterias how to decide which tags should be attached
> to packages, how to tag packages to mark them as "belonging" to a specific
> CDD, how should specific compile-time-features like ldap, ssl, kerberos, etc.
> be tagged ?
I see and agree on defining a policy for tagging for Debian, but again I
ask, whats the advantage for the CDD?
Greetings,
Sergio.
--
Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto@debian.org> <http://people.debian.org/~sto/>
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