Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo Enterprise deployment tools

[Thierry Carrez]

Alec Warner wrote:

>> 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.

I probably wasn't clear :)

I don't say that it cannot be done, and I don't ask what's the best way
to do it. I just ask *if* we should try to provide higher-level tools
(and/or doc) to help in doing so. It's not obvious (especially for
non-developers) how to proceed in that situation, even if a lot of
people have designed their own solution in their corner.

>> 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

Again, the technology is out there, it's just not tightly integrated.
Should we leave it as-is and let everyone design his own tools to
connect the dots or should we ?

>> 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?

Should we provide high-level software that defines an update pack (new
binaries + configuration changes), allows to test it on a preproduction
system and (once tested) to push it to registered production systems ?
Or let everyone write his own treefreezing + network mounts + shell
scripts + cfengine / CVS magic combo to do it ?

>   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 don't think it should be the role of the portage-team either.

> 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.

I sure hope they will comment on that thread :)

-- 
Koon
-- 
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