Hi again, I have something for the dselect etc. wish list: We would like to be able to put the packages in an unpacked state on a read-only NFS disk and then automagically create symlinks from the system directories to the NFS disk on our target systems that form a cluster. This of course makes sense only for application-level programs, not for basic system utilities.
An ideal dpkg implementation would allow to store all files that belong to a package in a special directory, the packages directory. In our installation, it is named /usr/local/packages and located on an NFS disk. Each package has its own subdirectory. Now, we install new packages only there, and then "activate" them on each machine in the network by simply creating symlinks from the system directories to the packages directory. To automate this, the installer program should unpack the debian package into a subdirectory and create a list of links to be made from the system directories into that subdirectory. This implies that the files in a package can only be installed in some well-defined set of system directories. To activate a package on any system that mounts the packages directory, we would just need a script to set up the symlinks. The packages directory could reside on CD or on read-only NFS disk, no local disk space beyond the links would be used. If a package gets removed or changed, we just have to remove dangling symlinks. There are some problems: - Most installation scripts install the info files using install-info. This could easily circumvented by providing a file that stores the information needed to link in an info file, and scanning this file when the package gets activated on a system. - Configuration files must be created/edited when the packages directory is created. If a target system requires different configurations, it just replaces the symlink by the actual config file. - Directories in /var must be created on the target systems, and the files copied in, instead of linked, in the assumption that they will be modified. I have used a semi-automatic version of this scheme for some time, and it works very well. I should be happy to contribute our experiences. Regards -Christoph -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
