Re: Support for NFS sharing of /usr under Debian?
Ian Jackson <iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk> writes:
> If you have the time, please go ahead and experiment. There is some
> documentation about how the current versions of dpkg do things on
> ftp.debian.org in /debian/project/standards; these are mainly written
> to explain things to package maintainers, but they may well be helpful
> to you too.
Well, last night I started reading some of these docs. My first thought was
that maybe "conffiles" was the solution - just have an option which only
installs the files listed here. But of course there are files which aren't
configuration files and don't live in /etc which aren't likely to be NFS
mounted - e.g. those in /sbin.
So far I've really only thought one step further than this, and I'm
wondering whether others have any input on whether the following will work
or not. The idea is that for each file to be installed, it is checked
whether the destination directory is NFS-mounted or not. Then the file is
installed only if the filesystem is local. Perhaps it should also be done
if the file doesn't exist on a remote filesystem? I'm not convinced this is
a good idea at the moment. Anyway, the idea being you install/upgrade the
package on your "main" system as normal, and then on all the other systems
you install/upgrade with a flag indicating to only install the local parts.
Mmmm... Maybe you can even specify which directories are to be considered
"local" and "remote" if you want to override the auto-detection for some
reason.
Anyway, I figure the most likely source of problems here are the install
scripts (mainly because I haven't looked at one yet to see the kinds of
things they do ;-). Are the pre/post install/rm scripts going to wreak
havoc with the above scheme? e.g. by deleting files from NFS filesystems
in preparation for the arrival of new copies which won't be forthcoming?
Time for me to go read some more, and look at some "real live" packages.
:-)
Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far.
Warwick
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Warwick Harvey email: warwick@cs.mu.OZ.AU
Department of Computer Science phone: +61-3-9282-2478
University of Melbourne fax: +61-3-9282-2490
Parkville, Victoria, AUSTRALIA 3052 web: http://www.cs.mu.OZ.AU/~warwick
Reply to: