Re: [custom] Custom Debian Distros need the help from debian developers
>From Andreas Tille on Tuesday, 2004-03-09 at 14:19:43 +0100:
> On Tue, 9 Mar 2004, Sergio Talens-Oliag wrote:
>
> > What I don't know is how good is cfengine for upgrades, mainly because
> > I've never used it ... ;(
> If you ask me I'd prefer a tested tool like cfengine over the manual
> approach you described above.
I am not questioning the usefulness of cfengine---and yes, it is used
by skolelinux to configure the system. My question is, is this the
rational thing to do? Don't packages and configuration go together?
The problem with building custom configurations into packages is of
course that in the end, you may have 200 different configurations,
or 20,000. When you include different configuration possibilities
in the packages, where do you draw the line?
Still, I believe that packages and configuration are logically
connected. Imagine a future where we have many different CDDs.
Maybe I want to have a blend of two or more different CDDs.
If cfengine is my tool, I now have to tear apart the cfengine
configuration file for two different CDDs and glue them back
together again. Does this make sense? I do not think so.
I want more flexibility!
I suppose what I want (without really knowing if this already
exists) is "configuration packages" that are intimately connected
with "binary packages". The "configuration packages" might well
be in places other than the standard Debian archives, because
the burden of supporting many many different configurations is
probably too much for Debian too handle.
But what I gain is flexibility---I can offer my configuration
files on relatively weak server, because downloading a few
textfiles requires so little bandwidth. The binaries can
be downloaded directly from Debian. If a particular set
of "configuration packages" proves to be enormously popular,
it could be included in standard Debian.
Conrad
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