Thierry Carrez wrote:
Hi folks,
I would like to get your opinion on Enterprise-oriented desktop
deployment tools for Gentoo Linux (or the lack of).
As a small company CIO, I deployed Gentoo on a small scale here but
quickly ran into scaling problems and the lack of tools to help.
There is no obvious way to freeze a Portage tree (or to design a
specific profile) for testing on a golden workstation, to build a set of
update packages (ServicePack) and push it to the workstations, or to
have centralized accountability of what's installed where. There is no
easy way to avoid having to keep a synchronized copy of the portage tree
on all systems, even when using yourown-binaries.
Network mountable trees seem to work well enough although an emerge
--metadata is still required on clients.
I would disagree also on the profile argument. Profiles are very
powerful, very details, and have decent manpages as well as literally
tons of examples. What specifically is stopping you from rolling your
own profile?
The rest of that stuff is a generally well known about issue ( at least
in the portage community ). Many features of portage-2.1 will be
helpful in this type of situation.
With automatic deployments, would we run into difficult-to-solve
etc-update problems ? Should/could the ServicePack system take care of
that ?
I wouldn't use etc-update for this on a enterprise rollout personally.
If you need config cfengine does a nice job, as well as using
cvs/rcs/something-else
Even in a simpler setup (preprod > production) we don't have the tools
to push a software configuration change from a test machine to a
production one.
What exactly are you looking for here?
What tools are missing ? Is it our job to provide them ? Can it
reasonably be done ? Am I just wrong to want to use Gentoo in that
direction ?
Portage needs work; I know the devs are working on it, I know there
are other people who are doing there own things. I see a lot of
portage-2.1 features that greatly simplify what you are trying to do (
repositories, config rewrite..etc.. ). I think portage and what it
covers is a big part of this. Recollecting a conversation with jstubbs
about portage he mentioned that he wouldn't want the portage-team to
maintain a Enterprise-like distribution program, but that the new API
would be great to write one against ;)
I also know Chotchki was looking at doing his senior thesis on a network
aware portage that did some cool things. A lot of this is just waiting
( and helping :) :) ) the portage devs get the work done that needs to
get done.
I know Cardoe and genstef? are working on a seperate package manager
that just handles binaries but uses all the current portage stuff, so
you might want to talk to them as well.
Next week: Gentoo-as-a-metadistribution tools :)
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