Re: Linuxconf alternative??

[Michael Stone <mstone@itri.loyola.edu>]

Quoting Kristoffer.Rose@ens-lyon.fr (Kristoffer.Rose@ens-lyon.fr):
> Matt writes (on debian private, moved here because it is of general interest):
> 
> > [...] I think that another thing I would want would be an extension to
> > dselect that would allow you to manage packages on machines accross a
> > network from one place.  If I have three machines identically configured,
> > I would want to upgrade them at once.
> 
> A "cluster-aware" dselect/apt would be a huge win for Debian and I'd like
> to contribute since I have to deal with the problem frequently...  Two
> specific issues are of particular importance and, IMHO, also now matured
> enough that we can tackle them:

Here's what I do:

I have a shell script called allsh -- based on ssh -- that runs a shell
on every one of my workstations. I get one machine the way I want it,
then do:

dpkg --get-selections '*' > /path/sels
allsh '</path/sels dpkg --set-selections'
allsh apt-get -y dselect-upgrade

It works pretty well for some things, but really gets annoying when you
have to answer a lot of config questions. The auto-configure stuff would
really come in handy here. The bottom line is that debian is almost all
the way there: all we need is a way to not answer 5000 mime-priority
questions and questions about package configurations that are going to
be cloned off a central machine anyway.

Mike Stone