autoup.sh & considerations on bail-out scripts
Hi, when looking through autoup.sh, I noticed something that may be a
problem. to wit, it seems as if it depends on ncftp for its ftp
method. First and foremost, this presents the problem that ncftp is
not free (open, I guess I should say:-), and is not on our official
CD. Second of all, I think it would be better to utilize something
that is more commonly available.
It seems as though the only way to execute a script non interactively
with plain ftp is with the use of a .netrc file. The script could
check to make sure the file does not exist, ask the user to create it,
write the commands to the file, and run ftp, cleaning it up
afterwards.
This seems like a very ugly hack, especially as it goes on in root's
home directory.
The other option would be to use perl somehow, possibly including the
FTP module. This seems a bit cleaner, and still something that is
available to most people, however, it will require more effort.
These two possibilities are within my technical grasp, so, of course,
I make myself available for implementation.
I think this script is *very* important to us, and we should do our
damndest to make it work well.
On a second topic, for those of you still reading, I'm wondering if it
might not be a good idea to have some for of bail-out script ability
for upgrades. In other words, the ability to run a script before
upgrades. This is sort of a vague, of the top of my head idea, but it
seems that it would be a good way to make sure we can always upgrade
smoothly, and with the existing frontends. I guess it is sort of a
hack, and an admission that our tools are not infallible, but I think
that's already painfully obvious. This would give us a way to
brute-force any details.
Thanks for listening,
--
David Welton http://www.efn.org/~davidw
Debian GNU/Linux - www.debian.org
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