[Labs-l] List of packages that are supported by tool labs

[Petr Bena]

Hi,

I think we should make a simple list (even autogenerated) of all
packages that are officialy supported by tool labs and are guaranteed
to be present on all execution nodes.

I know that I can open puppet definitions hierarchy for labs, check
recursively all templates we have from root to execution node and
check all these lists for my package X, but that is kind of hard-core
work to do for every single package.

We can't expect users of tool labs to ever do this to figure out, so
there needs to be a better list.


For example right now I need to be sure that package g++, make and
qt4-qmake are present. On some nodes it may be, on some other nodes it
may not be. I have root on tool labs and I can directly access every
server, check dpkg -l there, but regular users do not have this
ability so how they are supposed to verify that? These packages I
mentioned, like g++ are very common and probably even included by some
other puppet template than exec node, so I can't check against puppet
for exec node if this package is there, but it MAY BE (who knows)
present in some other template / definition inherited from other
puppet classes...

So right now this it's a little bit tricky to figure out if some
package is available and supported. Even if it is NOW on exec nodes,
nothing guarantees you that it will be there tommorow, or that it will
be there on future exec nodes (we have many exec nodes with different
configuration than other, that already causes lot of troubles, but
AFAIK I am not supposed to care about that)

Is there some simple solution for this?