Jeremy Baron <[email protected]> wrote: >> Which brings me >> to: Does anyone know an established format a) in which pro- >> jects could write down their requirements and b) that covers >> both Debian and Solaris? So when admins need to (re-)in- >> stall a server, they wouldn't have to guess which packages >> are (still) required, but could just collect all >> $HOME/.requirements for active accounts and when one of >> these could not be satisfied, there would also be a person >> to contact before tools get broken.
> I assume this is one of the reasons to use puppet? > Puppet manifests can have comments and the roots could establish a > standardized way of writing (inline) why a package is needed. > (e.g., > a) assumed to be widely used like sed, grep or > b) needed by the roots or a process that doesn't belong to a > particular user or MMP or > c) needed by users/MMP foo, baz, bar > or some combination of those.) > Of course most people (whether roots or users or anyone else) won't do > a very thorough job of enumerating dependencies when installing, > updating, hacking software unless they first do an installation of > that version on a brand new Debian install with a limited set of > installed packages. i.e. most people won't notice that a package is > needed or not already picked up some other way until they see > something is broken because it's missing. > I'm not sure if I like ~/.requirements (and maybe it could be > something like ~/.package-depends instead?) in place of puppet but at > least it could be used as a failsafe if a root wanted to check after > installing a new box or before removing a package. > [...] I wouldn't want to put the burden on the roots because that would mean that they have to mangle all the small notes that project X needs package Y into the puppet manifest which in most cases - as you noted - will not have much effect. If instead it'd be up to the project's developers, the workload lies with who has a) the information needed and b) the moti- vation. On second thought though, I think ~/.something is too hidden. We already have the nice [[Template:Tool]] on the Toolserver Wiki; it would be much better to store the depen- dencies as fields thus encouraging developers to update (or create) their pages there and give them more "publicity". Tim _______________________________________________ Toolserver-l mailing list ([email protected]) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/toolserver-l Posting guidelines for this list: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette
