[Yum] Feature request ... or How to.

[Seth Vidal]

On Wed, 5 May 2010, Les Mikesell wrote:

>
> Besides that, what I think the world needs is the ability for anyone who sets 
> up a machine for a particular purpose to publish its package list and anyone 
> else with no organizational relationship and little administrative experience 
> should be able to select that and get a functionally identical setup. And if 
> they can track the updates exactly, so much the better.  The difference from 
> a centrally controlled system would be that any number of configurations 
> could be published and the end user would pick the one with the functionality 
> he wants for a particular target machine.  That way people who need one or a 
> few machines wouldn't have to learn to be an expert system administrator 
> aware of thousands of package choices - they could just select an expertly 
> maintained model with the functionality they want and duplicate it. 
> Something like this could at least replace the 'respin' versions that grow up 
> around distributions and at best eliminate most of the work in building and 
> maintaining very specialized systems.
>
> You are right that a bit of local configuration management is currently 
> missing to make this 100% automatic, but it's the sort of thing computers 
> should be able to do for us.

If you think it is something needed all the tools are open to you to 
start.

1. generating an installed pkg list into an rss feed. - trivial.
2. having a history of everything installed/updated/removed - available 
now with the yum history db(thanks james!)

The piece you need to work on is taking the rss feed and using that to 
make the boxes match _mostly_.



-sv