[Yum-devel] groupreq in yum-2.6?

[Brian Long]

On Fri, 2006-05-12 at 11:15 -0400, Paul Nasrat wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-05-12 at 09:35 -0400, Brian Long wrote:
> 
> > > What precisely are you trying to achieve with groupreq?  Lets see if we
> > > can figure a way to do what you want.  
> > 
> > https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/yum/2006-April/008627.html
> 
> OK.  There are a few approaches here, but lets summarise the problem:
> 
> As a cluster admin, I want to deal with high level profiles (eg
> "Engineering Workstation"), a profile consists of various software
> groups which are deployed on an install.  Over the life of the profile I
> may wish to edit the groups, but do not wish to put the package
> information into the profile.
> 
> Could you give me some more concrete examples of the kind of group
> changes you'd expect to see over the life of the profile.  Could you
> also quantify the statement "If I move the source of truth from
> yumgroups.xml to each profile, it's increases my maintenance cost".
> Basically I can see what you're trying to do, but I want to understand
> the pain points, etc so any suggestions don't replicate them.
> 
> Anaconda and fedora specifics are probably getting a little off topic
> for this forum, so I'll skip those for the moment other than to quickly
> note I think multirepo support in anaconda will make some of the pain go
> away.  We already have initial support in rawhide (only lightly tested
> at the moment).  If you want to play with this, and feedback on what
> would help your needs - please mail me off list for basic instructions.
> 
> Also are you using anything like cfengine/puppet in your environment for
> high level management of all classes/profiles of machines post install.

I think Seth explained the details similar to what we do.  We do not use
cfengine at the moment; we stick every configuration change into an RPM.
Sometimes our RPMs use triggers to modify existing config files.  Other
times, our RPMs install a foo.conf.cisco and move it on top of the RH-
provided one in %post.

This allows us to version every configuration change across our
environment just using the RPM database.  We have an inventory agent
that runs daily on each host and reports back into a central repository.
We can then query "which hosts are running cisco-sendmail-config < 1.5"
and decide if we need to push an update or escalate to a sysadmin, etc.

/Brian/

-- 
       Brian Long                      |         |           |
       IT Data Center Systems          |       .|||.       .|||.
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