Re: Thoughts about changing Debian's release process
On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 08:09:16PM +0200, Torsten Landschoff wrote:
> > > > That's not true. If you can script it, FAI can do it. It just becomes a
> > > > post-installation task. Using packages.d.o as an example, it's just going to
> > > > be a predominantly an Apache configuration and some scripts, right? So you
> > > > restore the scripts from backup, and dump the Apache config into the
> > > > appropriate directory, all from within FAI.
> > >
> > > ... and adding users
> > > ... and adding groups
> > > ... and permissions
> > > ... fixing/checking paths
> > > ... and adding links
> > > ... and initialising
> > > ... and fixing scripts
> > > ... and fixing the installation
> > > ... and adding more permissions
> > > ... and monitoring the initialisation
> >
> > All doable.
>
> Yep. The problem is that you need umpteen iterations for the
> installation and you'll end up changing the FAI setup, installing,
> waiting half an hour, testing, doesn't work, change FAI, repeat.
>
> Or you'll fix it up by hand and forget to tell FAI of your manual
> changes to your next iteration will stop at the same position. And yes,
> I have experience with that. Currently I am working on a FAI setup for
> a lab of 10 Linux workstations which used to be manually maintained
> which just eats too much time...
I patched FAI to do on-line updates, i.e. system updates without
reinstallation. See
http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~glaweh/pfai
for details. In the near future, these patches will be merged into
mainstream FAI, so 'softupdate' support will be available there.
Thus, you can shorten your modify-test cycles quite a lot. the only things
not handled by softupdate are (re-)partitioning (doesn't make much sense) and
automatic software _removal_ when its not selected to be installed (I will
work on this when the merge is complete).
--
c u
henning
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