[Yum-devel] New plugin: service-restart

Konstantin Ryabitsev icon at fedoraproject.org
Wed Feb 14 20:27:29 UTC 2007


On 2/14/07, Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com> wrote:
> Let me ask a stupid question -- why go this route as opposed to using
> something like cfengine or puppet to handle kicking off your updates and
> then any service changes that need to occur?

I actually wrote this plugin specifically because I didn't want to
rely on bcfg2 to do it (in my case). For a config management system to
know when something needs to be updated, it has to have a list of
installed packages and a list of available packages. Bcfg2 has to have
a dump of all available packages in an xml file (with name and
version) just to perform such comparison. Maintaining that list drives
me batshit insane, and it's really dumb to go about it this way.

Yum is a package manager, and a config management system should not
try to re-implement yum. Really, all it needs to do is the equivalent
of "make sure package foo is installed". If you want a specific
version, then you should use versionlock (see, I'm not the first "down
that path") or some other way of pinning that works both when you run
"config update" and "yum update" on the actual machine. Config
management should be an aide, and never actually interfere with manual
administration.

> Because once we start going down this path, I can see a proliferation of
> similar sorts of plugins to finish fleshing out what you need for a
> cfengine or the like

Like I said, we already are well down that path, since we have
versionlock and installonlyn plugins. This is just an addition. I do
use a config management system, but it should be clear that each time
config management systems attempt to manage packages, they generally
do a much poorer job than yum would, if only because they try to work
on 15 different operating systems.

Implementing such feature in yum only makes sense. And this way I
don't have to maintain a list of 5000 packages in addition to what yum
already does for me.

Regards,
-- 
Konstantin Ryabitsev
Montréal, Québec


More information about the Yum-devel mailing list