On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 22:05, Tim Landscheidt <tim(a)tim-landscheidt.de> 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.
This all got me thinking: can SGE be told that a job needs a certain
package, choose a box that has it already installed, and keep relevant
stats so that roots know if a package should be installed somewhere
else as well?
-Jeremy