Having used debian for quite awhile now, I've really come to appreciate the package system and it works great on an individual machine basis. But as soon as you have to start keeping many debian systems in sync with each other, it starts to get time consuming using dselect.
How have others tackled this problem of keeping 10 or more debian linux machines synced together? I assume you don't go about running dselect on each machine. One alternative I can think of is to use dpkg --get-selection to get the list of installed packages on a master machine, and then use dpkg --set-selection on the rest of the machines to set what is selected to be installed, and then to run dpkg over there. Still in that case, I still have to babysit each install process and answer the same questions in the post-install scripts as I did on the master machine. The other alternative seems to be using rdist or some similar program and rdisting /usr and selected parts of /var to the other machines. But in that case, I break the package lists on the other machines since the other machines will no longer know the correct list of packages already installed, and it is conceivable that someone might want to add one or two packages not in the "standard" distribution in which case it might fail. Ideas? Thanks.
