Re: Application management

[Jamie Wilkinson]

This one time, at band camp, Allen Bettilyon wrote:
>apt is perfect solution for managing both debian and rpm packages.

apt is great, there's no doubt.  But it isn't feasible to use apt on our
Red Hat machines.

My goal is to lay cfengine on top of each operating system's own package
management system, just as it does with resolv, netconfig, disks, tidy,
processes, to name a few.

For example:

packages:

  redhat::

    openldap-server version>=2.0.7 define=ldap_chkconfig
    iptables
    httpd-devel act=remove

  debian::

     slapd
     apache-devel act=purge

I'm following Debian's package management verbs here, action defaults to
"install", but can also be "remove" or "purge" (On non-Debian systems,
these two would be identical).

"version" takes a boolean operator and a package version, and enforces that
the installed version of a package meets this criteria, giving an error or
warning depending on how successful an install would be.

Mapping package names between operating systems isn't the scope of this
section, it gets complex to the point of impossible when you start looking
at operating systems without large public package repositories.

Initialising the package management system with a source of downloadable
packages may have to be implemented as an addition to the control: section 
(the other option is supplying an example fragment of cfengine program
showing how to initialise the package manager).

What do people think of this?  I'm open to comments, I haven't started
developing such a patch just yet so I'm not committed to this syntax yet.
I get the impression that a lot of people would find it useful though.

-- 
jaq@spacepants.org                           http://spacepants.org/jaq.gpg