hey andrew, On Sun, Jul 31, 2005 at 09:12:14PM +1200, Andrew McMillan wrote: > Well, that's a problem because "Recommends" can be ignored. The web app > is not functional without a database, and possibly is literally > dependent on a particular version. In that case the Recommends does not > capture the need and it would be nice to have an appropriate "Depends". recommends can be ignored, but that's the point of recommends vs depends. > Having "remote-..." packages might give some other possibilities as > well, and what does it lose? it just doesn't seem like the cleanest fix to me, because it involves using the package management system and an empty dummy package to solve a problem that could imo be handled without doing so. see further down. > Personally, "Recommends" have been a pain to me in the past by getting > pulled in by package installations where I do not want them. When I am > installing a web application I am often separating the application and > database for security reasons as much as for performance ones, and I > don't usually want to accidentally have database servers on the internet > - even unused ones. in such a case i would say that you should pay closer attention to what you're installing. for example, if i'm installing a new potentially big package on a system, i'll do a dry-run before the real thing and/or read through the list of stuff to be installed. > > that said, it would be fairly easy (and not dependant on mucking with the > > package management system) to determine if a local database server is not > > installed, and inform the admin giving them the "stop now, i'll install > > a db server" vs. "i'm installing on a remote server" choices in debconf. > > something like this would be pretty easy to throw into dbconfig-common. > > Excellent :-) i think this could be pretty easily extended to accomplish basically the same thing you want to have done with the remote series of packages. let's say we have tese remote packages. a user installs a dbapp, and it brings in the db server to satisfy the depends. the user then configures it to use a rmeote database, and installs the remote db package and removes the local server packages. the next time a webapp is installed, it detects that the local server isn't installed and that a remote server has been used before, and provides the admin with the choices of quitting or using a remote connection. what i'm suggesting is to basically do the same thing but to get the "remote" server usage information by scanning config files or data files or something similar rather than scanning the list of installed packages. sean --
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