David, I liked your letter. Since you were painting in broad strokes I see no need to pick nits but I think many of your site management concerns would be better handled by a tool like cfengine than a client-server model for dpkg.
(Bruce Parens, I hope you're listening) The idea that sprang to mind as I read your scenarios was that we should have either an optional base disk or a very well described recipe for adding NFS to a new system. An NFS disk makes a lot of sense to me. I call it an NFS disk but I realize that most of the binary/net directory would probably be on it. PPP and SLIP access is the next increment to consider. We would need setup scripts to ask the questions for IP numbers, phones, modems and logins. Also, can ftp.debian.org or one of the mirrors be NFS mounted? Since I don't use NFS yet, I have not looked into NFS availability. Thanks, Costa
