Re: Method of Accessing Package Databases in Cfengine

[Phil D'Amore]

On Sun, 2005-01-09 at 23:38, Tim Nelson wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Brian E. Seppanen wrote:
> 
> > Was there a method for accessing package databases from
> >
> > redhat - rpm
> > debian - dpkg
> > solaris - pkg
> >
> > that is native to the newer versions of cfengine?
> 
>       There's a package mechanism, but:
> 1.    It only reads what packages are where; it allows you to define
>       classes based on whether the package is installed, and if so,
>       which version, but doesn't have an "else install" option.
>       You could combine this with shellcommands, though, to achieve
>       this effect.  This appears to be exactly what you were asking for;
>       or did you have something more general in mind? 

I submitted a patch here about 2 months ago IIRC that adds an option to
automatically install the packages in question, but never got any
feedback on it.  If there is interest in this I can dust it off and try
to re-submit it.

> 2.    It currently only supports RPM, although it appears to have been
>       designed to be easily expandable.

When writing the patch mentioned above, I noticed that folks had in fact
contributed debian and I'm pretty sure also solaris support to this
mechanism.  Unfortunately, nobody ever contributed the docs updates to
go with them, so what is in the docs only reflects the original work
done to add packages: in the first place.

> 
> http://www.iu.hio.no/cfengine/docs/cfengine-Reference.html#packages
> 
>       I'm hoping that Arpmats (http://arpmats.sourceforge.net/) will 
> someday support multiple package managers, but at this point, it supports 
> only RPM also.
> 
>       Thanks,
-- 
Phil D'Amore                             "Sometimes there is a fine line
Senior System Administrator               between criminally abusive
Red Hat, Inc                              behavior and fun."
Office: 919.754.3700 x44395                 -- Ted the Generic Guy
Pager: 877.383.8795                            (Dilbert 4/19/2003)