Re: Bundling .debs with their debconf data

[m.delahaye@esiee.fr (Matthieu Delahaye)]

First I want to clarify something:
- I wrote about FAI as an alternative. It clearly depends on user needs.
- I indepedently evoked LDAP as a possible debconf backend. I'm not
  proposing a collaboration between FAI/LDAP.
  
> 
> To give you a practical idea of what I mean, I'd be curious to see the
> results of this from each of your machines:
> 
>   (dpkg -l; cat /var/cache/debconf/config.dat) | md5sum
> 
> I'm wondering if you'll find that you have close to 120 different
> machines, as unique as snowflakes, rather than 3-4 different software
> configurations. 
12 differents results. Due to:
- Different software configurations
- Hardware configuration: we add sometime a package to manage hardware
  acceleration of a famous graphical card.
- Network configuration and other host specifities not managed by debconf

Some of this difference would be due to debconf
> management issues, and some might be due to FAI's default behavior of
> downloading the latest version of whatever it finds on the archive
> servers during initial install -- the same FAI configuration will
> produce different machines on different days.  
>
If you're working with unstable or testing you're right. Stable is not so
often updated and we don't install all packages which mean we are not
always affected by new packages provided in security and subrelease.
Thus it is not so difficult to know if you may be affected by a new
package version.

Matthieu