Wish: Perennial Directory
Good evening, all. Hope you don't mind my intruding on your list for a few
moments...
I'm responsible for a few Debian hosts, and, often, I find myself wishing
that apt/dpkg/dselect were smarter about managing the network. I'm not
looking for unattended upgrades or anything like that; just better
centralization. A few examples from tonight:
Each host separately queries several APT repositories and builds a local
database of available packages, but that 'local' database is identical on
all the hosts. If I want to support packages from alternative
repositories, and/or I set up a new host, I have to reconfigure each
affected host. There are always delays when starting dpkg and dselect
because they have to work with a 6.5MB text file describing all available
packages.
It seems that putting the 'available' list and the 'sources' list (and
maybe others) in LDAP would be appropriate. These files are pretty flat,
and they don't change very much. Most of the manipulations done against
the 'available' list are searches. I already have a lot of other
network-related information stored in LDAP.
Replacing some flat text files with LDAP entries doesn't sound
complicated. It took me about eight minutes to write a script that
converted /var/lib/dpkg/available to LDIF. If there are appropriate hooks
in dpkg/apt for changing the mechanism for DB queries, then I'd be willing
to spend some time studying and coding.
However, I shouldn't pursue this if the idea is misguided or if it would
be difficult to implement. A search of the mailing list archives shows
that the issue of dpkg-APT-LDAP integration has come up before:
http://lists.debian.org/deity/2000/deity-200006/msg00054.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/1999/debian-dpkg-199907/msg00045.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2000/debian-dpkg-200005/msg00075.html
but, from what I can find on the mailing lists, it doesn't seem that these
discussions really went anywhere. Is there a reason for this? Have I
misled myself in thinking LDAP appropriate? Would adapting dpkg/apt be
difficult? _Are_ there nice hooks for this kind of thing?
Feedback would be appreciated.
Tim Otten
tim@cap.american.edu
P.S. If anyone responds to this, it would be helpful if you could CC me
because I'm not a list member.
P.P.S. I'm not a Debian developer, so be gentle. :)
Reply to: