Re: Fedora server implementation straw man

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Mon, 27 Jan 2014 21:28:37 -0500
Shawn Starr <shawn.starr(a)rogers.com&gt; wrote:

>  Hello folks, 
Hey. 

>  I previously worked with Red Hat on their Red Hat HPC Solution (our
>  original Fork/redo of NPACI Rocks which was.. difficult). It's
>  discontinued now.
>  
>  We had the concept of kits to do metapackages. I have the last CVS
>  snapshot code available for people to examine. I will have to mirror
>  it somewhere as my laptop as a VM/web server can only handle so much
>  bandwidth :)
>  
>  The concept was this:
>  
>  kit-something ---> pulls in:  kit-client-configs / kit-server-configs
>  <--- pulls in RPM dependencies for packages. Kits == Roles basically.
>  
>  Now, we didn't have comps.xml to work with but we could maybe do
>  something like: We have a roles.xml which maps to comps.xml groups.
>  
>  So, then "Fedora Server Role" maps to X groups in comps.xml which
>  pulls in the direct RPM dependencies.
>  
>  The "Fedora Server Role" RPM/whatever can have then its own "turn
>  key" configuration template/setup files for the groups it pulls in to
>  configure them out-of-the-box.
>  
>  so:
>  
>  role-something ---> pulls in: role-client-configs /
>  role-server-configs <--- pulls in comps.xml group package RPM
>  dependencies as part of each grouping
>  
>  That way, we dont break existing users where a Desktop also contains
>  server configurations (comps.xml -> RPM dependencies only) and we
>  gain the ability to have a higher-level grouping which adds on
>  turn-key meta configurations that are *optional*.
>  
>  So its a one way-dependency mapping and both use cases win!
>  
>  Thoughts? 
metapackages have a number of issues... see the cons section of: 
http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumGroupsOverview

In the case of just a 'fedora-server-freeipa' role, they make sense to
me, as if someone removes a specific package that this role needs, it
would remove the role package, which is fine, since they would no
longer be using the role.

I'm not sure what deeper level you are suggesting here, can you provide
a more detailed example?

kevin