Re: master/slave mode for dpkg

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

debacle@debian.org wrote:
>For example the master may have all the slaves package
>information in /var/lib/dpkg-master/<slave>/ instead of the
>slaves /var/lib/dpkg/.  Of course, the slave has to have
>some kind of deamon (dpkgd?), so that the scripts
>{pre,post}{inst,rm} can run on the slave.  I don't know what
>impact this idea has on apt and debconf.

Wouldn't it be much more sensible and stable to mount the slave's
/var/lib/dpkg (and anything else necessary, like /var/cache/apt) over
something like NFS from the master's /var/lib/dpkg-master/<slave>?
Unless you're proposing a system which installs the packages on many
slaves at once from the same package database [1], I don't see what not
using the existing tools would gain you.

[1] Although I wouldn't like to have to specify what happens in the case
    where one slave is down for hardware maintenance when you upgrade a
    package on the others ... instead of such a system I'd just
    NFS-mount the various directories that the FHS specifies as
    shareable.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]