Good evening, all. Hope you don't mind my intruding on your list for a few moments...
I'm responsible for a few Debian hosts, and, often, I find myself wishing that apt/dpkg/dselect were smarter about managing the network. I'm not looking for unattended upgrades or anything like that; just better centralization. A few examples from tonight: Each host separately queries several APT repositories and builds a local database of available packages, but that 'local' database is identical on all the hosts. If I want to support packages from alternative repositories, and/or I set up a new host, I have to reconfigure each affected host. There are always delays when starting dpkg and dselect because they have to work with a 6.5MB text file describing all available packages. It seems that putting the 'available' list and the 'sources' list (and maybe others) in LDAP would be appropriate. These files are pretty flat, and they don't change very much. Most of the manipulations done against the 'available' list are searches. I already have a lot of other network-related information stored in LDAP. Replacing some flat text files with LDAP entries doesn't sound complicated. It took me about eight minutes to write a script that converted /var/lib/dpkg/available to LDIF. If there are appropriate hooks in dpkg/apt for changing the mechanism for DB queries, then I'd be willing to spend some time studying and coding. However, I shouldn't pursue this if the idea is misguided or if it would be difficult to implement. A search of the mailing list archives shows that the issue of dpkg-APT-LDAP integration has come up before: http://lists.debian.org/deity/2000/deity-200006/msg00054.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/1999/debian-dpkg-199907/msg00045.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2000/debian-dpkg-200005/msg00075.html but, from what I can find on the mailing lists, it doesn't seem that these discussions really went anywhere. Is there a reason for this? Have I misled myself in thinking LDAP appropriate? Would adapting dpkg/apt be difficult? _Are_ there nice hooks for this kind of thing? Feedback would be appreciated. Tim Otten [EMAIL PROTECTED] P.S. If anyone responds to this, it would be helpful if you could CC me because I'm not a list member. P.P.S. I'm not a Debian developer, so be gentle. :)
