"DaB." WP@daniel.baur4.info wrote:
[...]
I believe we had several issues already in the past when the installed soft- ware differed between the Solaris servers. 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.
That is a nice plan, but it would not work, because most users are not capable to tell what liberies they need. And it is BTW not a problem to have a libery installed that is not used (because we have enough free space for that). [...]
It's not only a question of space, but also of availability. I don't know about Debian or Solaris, but on Fedora some packages are sent to a farm up north when they don't compile in the current release and noone volunteers to fix it. I wouldn't want the admins in this case to work on such prob- lems if there is no existing demand.
I'm more optimistic regarding the abilities of the tool- server users - if someone can write "import x" or "use y;" they should be able to copy and paste that to another file. And if they don't, that'd be a nice opportunity to ask for and share some knowledge.
Tim