[1271] in athena10
the debathena-managed metapackage
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Wed Mar 4 19:21:06 2009
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From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: debathena@mit.edu
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Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2009 19:20:10 -0500
It has been pointed out that the debathena-managed metapackage has
been discussed in a number of forums, but not yet in any single forum
that reaches everyone. Hopefully this is that forum...
For some time now, there has been discussion of creating a metapackage
somewhere between -cluster and -workstation. This package has been
tenatively named "-managed". Here is what the package contents are
envisioned to be:
Depends: debathena-auto-update, debathena-build-depends, debathena-
clusterinfo, debathena-dns-config*, debathena-emacs-config, debathena-
extra-software, deabthena-misc-glue, debathena-{ntp|chrony}-config,
debathena-tmp-cleaner, debathena-transcript-glue, debathena-
workstation, debathena-xlock
* debathena-dns-config is debatable, I don't care either way
Basically, it's a cluster package, minus the login chroot, minus
larvnet, and minus syslog-config
The intended audience of this package is twofold:
- people who currently have Athena 9 workstations that they want to
install and forget about
- people who maintain departmental or group clusters
The auto-updater is one of the more important packages here. The
reason the answer is not "Just install workstation and the auto-
updater" is because it's an extra step and frankly, there's a lot of
value both to the user and Support folks if users can install
something and not actually have to care about explicitly keeping it up
to date. One of the primary reasons to choose Athena 9 over RHEL/
Ubuntu/Fedora/whatever is that you can install it and feel reasonably
assured that it's kept up to date. It's a very "hands-off" experience
which comes at the expense of flexibility, and many people prefer that
tradeoff.
I think that's mostly it - others should chime in if I missed anything.
-Jon
