Re: Question about the policy
Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr> wrote:
> Now, is it really useless to share them? Why?
[...] snipped with interest and approval
> Summary: there are at least two ways to share TeX stuff in the sense
> considered by the FHS:
>
> 1. For big networks centrally administered, you probably want to have
> a master host and your gazillion slave hosts having exactly the
> same TeX configuration. In this case, most of the TeX stuff should
> go to /usr/share instead of /var.
>
> 2. OTOH, one could imagine a network of several machines independently
> administered, where the /usr/share/texmf shipped by Debian is only
> expected to be a sharable texmf tree. In this case, several things
> are not necessarily useful to share that were considered useful in
> the first scheme (for instance, format files). These things could
> go to /var instead of /usr/share.
>
> Maybe we should choose among the two schemes and document that in the
> TeX policy (and maybe that has already happened and I forgot it).
I can only speak for the last two(?) years that I closely followed this
list, and I think it has not been explicitly decided.
I think one important aspect for choosing is to check whether both
schemes will actually work, and it seems to me that scheme 2 is very
hard to do.
In
Scheme 1,
=========
after installing stuff on the master host, you need to do
two or three things on the slaves:
a) create all directories that have been created on non-shared trees on
master.
b) if /etc is not shared, mirror it to the slaves
c) run the maintainer scripts. This requires /var/lib/dpkg/info to be
somehow shared (it may be accessible at a different location), but if
the debconf information is also shared, all you have to do is
DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive dpkg-reconfigure <package>
This will create all files in /var (and redo lots of things in /etc,
but since maintainer scripts are re-entrant it doesn't matter).
Scheme 2
========
ist not completely clear to me. Do you think that the slave host can
actually have differen _Debian_ packages installed? That seems to be
impossible to me, or extremely difficult, maybe you can give dpkg a
different root dir by some configuration option.
On the other hand, if installations on the slaves differ from master
only in /usr/local and /etc, we are at Scheme 1 again, aren't we, except
that in point b) above 's/mirror it to/synchronize with/' to allow for
different configuration.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer
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