Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Debian stable or testing? apt-get or yum? etc.

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Posted by Roberto Mello on
Andrew,

Many other people share this need. So they've created repositories of packages backported to Debian stable releases. Some examples are http://www.backports.org/ and http://www.apt-get.org/ (this one being more a collection of URLs to third-parties' backports).

Many Debian packagers also make backports of their packages to stable, because they use it too. Often they are made available in apt-gettable repositories in http://people.debian.org/

Recently I installed OpenACS 5 on a stable machine and had no trouble. Oliver Elphick (PostgreSQL's package maintainer) makes backports available at http://people.debian.org/~elphick/

Regarding YUM, Debian is so much more than the packaging system. RPMs still have no way to be interactively configured (like with debconf). With the notable exception of Mandrake, no other RPM-based distribution uses the menu system. I installed apt4rpm and it leaves much to be desired. And Debian so many more packages readily available. This is specially relevant for a desktop-type machine, but also for a server. The other day I couldn't find IceWM RPMs for a server, for example.

As for your maintenance issue, I have faced the same. I think I am going to move towards a thin client approach. I'll have a home server doing everything, and all my other machines (kitchen's, wife's, son's, except for my laptop) to be thin clients. That way I only have to manage one machine.

And since I'm researching OpenMosix for my masters, I will make all the machines to be on it, so processes are migrated and I use some of the processing power of those machines. The OpenMosix web site has documentation on how to make OpenMosix work with LTSP.

-Roberto

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Roberto, excellent, that's much of the sort of info I was looking for. So do you recommend Debian Stable plus backports, rather then running Debian Testing?

I don't want interactive configurability, I think it's evil. Yes, I see why package install-time configurability is very desirable and useful, so rpm not having anything like that is very bad. But it should not be interactive (except optionally), it should be scriptable. I should be able to make an API call saying, "what are the configuration questions I need to answer?", then save the answers in a script and automate everything.

Regarding Debian being "so much more than the packaging system", yes, I'm at least peripherally aware of that. Comments I've read elsewhere suggest that the real value-added in packaging software (rpm or deb) is all the hard work that goes into (or should go into) keeping a very large set of packages organized, consistent, rational, and sane - avoiding dependency loops, etc. And here Debian would seem to still be substantially ahead of any other distribution, likely because they've had the pre-requisite enabling tools like apt-get for a much longer time, and thus recognized and started working on the hard stuff much earlier.

I plan to mostly have fattish clients, not thin. (Exceptions might be certain special purposes, like if I ever had a small-ish diskless Beowulf cluster.) Which is to say, each client has its own disk and own installed software, but any data that needs to be backed up should be on the central file server.

Probably I'll end up with separate home directories on each machine even though (dependings on how installs and configuration updates are handled) that might be in some conflict with the above. So far I don't really know much about LDAP, NIS, etc., and I do want many (though not necessarily all) machines in my home network to still be able to function just fine even if the file server is down. If it's feasible to combine the best of both worlds - all user logins and home directories centrally controlled and consistent, but still retain the ability to temporarily (ideally, even permanently) revert to operating "detached" from the central server - if that's feasible I'd appreciate pointers to how to do it.

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Posted by Roberto Mello on
Definitely stable + backports. Testing is your worse call because you don't have all the updated stuff of unstable, and security updates must go through stable backporting -> unstable -> testing.

I didn't say debconf was not scriptable. It is. You can configure it to show you only ubber-critical things that it must ask, and even then there are reasonable defaults. Your debconf answers are saved by default.

Well, what you say regarding Debian is true, but the Debian policies (IMHO) are what make the difference. Take the menu system for example. It's not enough that it's there unless every package of a graphical application is required to register itself with the menu system, so that you have a consistent menu of applications regardless of desktop environment/window manager you choose to use.

Red Hat and Mandrake have adopted Debian's menu and alternatives systems, but their packages don't use it very much (yet). There are only a few alternatives options on a Red Hat 9 install I did yesterday.

With fat clients and keeping your central file system replicated to client machines, you might want to look at an rsync solution. There is probably something on freshmeat for doing that.

-Roberto