I'm actually in the process of porting all the unattended scripts over to wpkg.
The way I see it... Unattended is great for installing the base OS. After that, wpkg seems to have a better handle on workstation software/patch maintenance.. ( with it's various checks, conditional operations, and uninstall/upgrade capabilities ). With wpkg always running at system start, it will allow a better configuration management after the system is running. My proposal is this.. Unattended loads the OS and installs ActivePerl and wpkg. Wpkg takes over and installs the hotfixes, patches, applications, etc... If we need to update a set of systems, update the profile in wpkg and the next reboot of the machine, it updates itself. This update could be scheduled, or manually initiated. I'm looking to expand the default package.xml layout by adding a comment with the download URL ( format taken from the unattended scripts files ), and using a modified version of 'prepare' to parse all the urls in the wpkg package.xml file. I do believe these two projects will make a GREAT open source deployment and configuration management suite. Michael J. Kidd Dr. Frank Lee wrote: > Hi All, > > An informal conversation between a few users of WPKG and/or unattended has > lead me to wonder whether there is any future in trying to combine the two > projects in some way. > > WPKG is concerned with application management, installing and removing > packages once the machine has been deployed. Unattended is concerned with > building the machine with the right packages installed. > > In each case, some packages other than the operating system must be > installed. There would seem to be some overlap here which it would be nice > to consolidate. Currently, each project requires users to have a set of > installation instructions for each package. Would it be worthwhile to be > able to share configuration files for this? Lots of effort has been put in > to making hotfixes installable by each system, for example. Unless we > actually believe the MS press-releases, this will continue for Vista and > seems like an un-necessary duplication of effort. > > The major difference in the installation methods seems to be that WPKG > requires an explicit method of checking whether a package is installed and > that Unattended relies on instructions being popped from a stack. Would it > be sensible to have a parser of WPKG configuration files available to > unattended to manipulate the stack? > > An example of my thinking; A WPKG configuration file might consist of the > following XML: > > <package id='foo'> > <check type='uninstall' value='package-foo'/> > <install command='\\server\share\foo\install.exe /S' /> > <remove command='Something irrelevant to unattended' /> > <upgrade command='We dont care' /> > </package> > > A parser, which could be invoked with "ua-wpkg /install=foo" command line, > would see whether there was already a string in the registry for > 'package-foo'. If not, it would push the command > \\server\share\foo\install.exe /S onto the stack, for it to be executed in > the normal way. > > In WPKG, lists of applications are stored in XML files, so presumably > there ought to be a command like "ua-wpkg /addpackages" on the stack which > pushes commands like "ua-wpkg /install=foo" onto the stack to be handled > later. > > I realise that this seems to be bringing WPKG-compatibility to unattended > and that perhaps I'm thinking about things the wrong way around. > > Any thoughts or comments? > > Yours, > > Frank > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT > Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your > opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash > http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV > _______________________________________________ > unattended-devel mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-devel > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ unattended-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-devel
