[OpenAFS] Re: Package Management in AFS

[Andrew Deason]

On Mon, 20 Dec 2010 19:34:23 +0100
Dirk Heinrichs <dirk.heinrichs@altum.de> wrote:

> Am 20.12.2010 19:26, schrieb Booker Bense:
> 
> > My 2 cents... Outside of a few very specialized apps, putting
> > software in AFS is a losing proposition these days. Since local disk
> > space is growing so fast, there really is little justification for
> > not simply using the package management system of the OS and simply
> > installing locally.
> 
> That would again mean that the sw had to be installed over and over
> again, on every single machine. That may be OK for 2 or 5 machines,
> but for a larger number this becomes a tedious task.

While I certainly don't believe putting software in AFS is meritless,
installing software locally on many different machines is highly
automatable, if they're under your control. The technology for doing
that sees much wider use than 'packaging in AFS' (cfengine, bcfg2,
puppet), so if you're looking for something more off-the-shelf, that
might be a lot easier.

> And what about diskless clients?

Booker's point may have been "storage is cheap, so stick a disk in them"
:)

> I don't get that point. If there was an AFS aware package manager out
> there (which was my question), then that overhead would drop to
> (nearly) zero.

I also just remembered Rune's presentation at BPW this year on Dapty:
<http://www.0l.se/>, which may be relevant. However, that is more of a
service for running software, not a product for doing it yourself.

-- 
Andrew Deason
adeason@sinenomine.net