Discussion of Fedora Server use-cases

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 29.10.2013 16:22, Simo Sorce wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-10-29 at 16:12 +0100, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
>> On 28.10.2013 23:55, Michael R. Davis wrote:
>
>>>> Would there be an equivalent -off for folks who wish to manually tinker
>>>> prior to enabling?
>>>
>>> yum erase httpd-on; turns it off it's just a wrapper package...
>>>
>>> but yum install httpd; service httpd start; would still work.
>>>
>>>> I'm not convinced that yum should be in the business of
>>>> enabling/disabling services like this.
>>>
>>> "yum" would not be. The spec "post" would actually "do" it.
>>>
>>
>> Wether a service is started or not is a policy decision that is local to
>> the site where the service is installed and as such shouldn't be
>> hard-coded into a package. Site local configuration policies lie
>> completely outside the scope of package management and as such littering
>> the distribution with lots of "*-on" packages just to make life a tiny
>> bit easier for lazy admins is a really terrible idea I think.
>
>
> Well there is a case for distributing policy via RPMs, it is a fine
> distribution mechanism IMHO, but it is self-evidently a completely local
> one, and will be better served by custom admin RPMs rather than
> distribution provided ones.

I guess the fact that a service comes with a default configuration file 
already counts as policy distribution but encapsulating something like 
"chkconfig X on && service X start" in its own distribution maintained 
package seems like overkill to me.

I don't think its a good idea to make the line between package and 
configuration management too blurry.

Regards,
   Dennis