I stumbled upon a comment from Richard Elling (found on http://blogs.sun.com/sch/entry/observations_on_packaging) which states:
"A packaging system should place bits on media. Any configuration of those bits which requires human intervention should be done elsewhere. Interactive packages which ask questions should be flogged, flayed, and publicly humiliated." I think he is absolutely right. Packaging should only put bits on media. Doing configuration management during package installation does not scale well. It also does not take lifecycle management into account. Package installation happens mostly at the beginning of a servers lifecycle. Let's say you have set up a couple of hundred servers. After several months you want to change some configuration files on a range of servers. I guess you don't do it with a pkgrm and then run pkgadd with a new responsefile? That's because configuration does not belong to the package. What is needed is an integration with something like cfengine, puppet or bcfg2. Something that covers a servers whole lifecycle, not only the installation and scales well over a couple of hundreds of boxes. In fact, in my life as a sysadmin, the installation part of a server is kids play. Keeping OS configuration across the whole server farm under control, is what consumes huge amounts of time. How do you want to manage your datacenter? This message posted from opensolaris.org
