Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo Enterprise deployment tools

[Alec Warner]

Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I would like to get your opinion on Enterprise-oriented desktop
> deployment tools for Gentoo Linux (or the lack of).
>
> As a small company CIO, I deployed Gentoo on a small scale here but
> quickly ran into scaling problems and the lack of tools to help.
>
> There is no obvious way to freeze a Portage tree (or to design a
> specific profile) for testing on a golden workstation, to build a set of
> update packages (ServicePack) and push it to the workstations, or to
> have centralized accountability of what's installed where. There is no
> easy way to avoid having to keep a synchronized copy of the portage tree
> on all systems, even when using yourown-binaries.

Network mountable trees seem to work well enough although an emerge 
--metadata is still required on clients.
I would disagree also on the profile argument.  Profiles are very 
powerful, very details, and have decent manpages as well as literally 
tons of examples.  What specifically is stopping you from rolling your 
own profile?

The rest of that stuff is a generally well known about issue ( at least 
in the portage community ).  Many features of portage-2.1 will be 
helpful in this type of situation.

> With automatic deployments, would we run into difficult-to-solve
> etc-update problems ? Should/could the ServicePack system take care of
> that ?
  I wouldn't use etc-update for this on a enterprise rollout personally. 
    If you need config cfengine does a nice job, as well as using 
cvs/rcs/something-else

>
> Even in a simpler setup (preprod > production) we don't have the tools
> to push a software configuration change from a test machine to a
> production one.
   What exactly are you looking for here?
>
> What tools are missing ? Is it our job to provide them ? Can it
> reasonably be done ? Am I just wrong to want to use Gentoo in that
> direction ?
   Portage needs work; I know the devs are working on it, I know there 
are other people who are doing there own things.  I see a lot of 
portage-2.1 features that greatly simplify what you are trying to do ( 
repositories, config rewrite..etc.. ).  I think portage and what it 
covers is a big part of this.  Recollecting a conversation with jstubbs 
about portage he mentioned that he wouldn't want the portage-team to 
maintain a Enterprise-like distribution program, but that the new API 
would be great to write one against ;)

I also know Chotchki was looking at doing his senior thesis on a network 
aware portage that did some cool things.  A lot of this is just waiting 
( and helping :) :) ) the portage devs get the work done that needs to 
get done.

I know Cardoe and genstef? are working on a seperate package manager 
that just handles binaries but uses all the current portage stuff, so 
you might want to talk to them as well.

>
> Next week: Gentoo-as-a-metadistribution tools :)
>

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