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

[yum at schlomo.schapiro.org]

On 03/05/10 20:06, Seth Vidal wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, 3 May 2010, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 
>> I've always thought this was a serious omission in all of the package
>> managers and that it would be really useful to be able to take any
>> arbitrary machine that might have been carefully tuned for a specific
>> purpose and 'publish' its package list.   Then anyone else who wanted
>> a similar setup could tell his package manager to duplicate it without
>> having to repeat the work of researching and choosing the package
>> list.  It would be even better if you could 'subscribe' to a published
>> list and track the exact versions installed on the master copy so you
>> wouldn't do updates until you knew someone had tested the new version
>> combinations already.
> 
> 
> The problem is not the pkg list - we have that - debug-dump gives you a
> good approximation - the problem is you need to couple that with configs.
> 
> And by the time you've done that you're better off using kickstart +
> configmgmt - like puppet or cfengine or bcfg2.

Yes, indeed. If you plan to manage a large enough farm of system (e.g. webserver
farm) then you could also think about putting the configurations into RPMs,
though it takes a certain amount of work to circumvent the various file conflicts.

I built a PoC environment with that and can tell you that it is possible and
also has several advantages over classical configuration management solutions
(cfengine, bcfg2, puppet), but comes at a certain price of extra work and thinking.

Schlomo