[1290] in athena10
Re: the debathena-managed metapackage
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Price)
Thu Mar 5 17:04:06 2009
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 16:52:18 -0500
From: Greg Price <price@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>
Cc: debathena@mit.edu
Message-ID: <20090305215217.GA1218@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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On Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 07:20:10PM -0500, Jonathan Reed wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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
Sounds like a good idea. We've heard from a number of users
installing living-group public machines or the like, that we end up
recommending debathena-workstation to but wish there were something
more complete we could recommend. The departmental/group cluster case
sounds very similar.
> 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
To put this another way, I think this means three packages fewer than
debathena-cluster:
debathena-cluster-login-config
debathena-reactivate
debathena-larvnet
This is basically reasonable. I think this and the long list of
dependencies it would include point out some issues that we should
think about:
- cluster-login-config, among other changes, enables a user to log
out someone who's left the screensaver going for a while. Many of
the users who want -managed, the ones setting up local public
machines, may want this.
- Several of the packages pulled in here represent Athena software
and may belong in -workstation or lower: -transcript-glue,
-misc-glue, -xlock. I believe the main reason they aren't already
is that they were written by ghudson and rbasch, who were focussed
on the cluster release.
- Similarly, -emacs-config, -{ntp|chrony}-config, and -dns-config may
belong in -locker and thereby in -standard.
- -build-depends really should be in -extra-software.
If we made all of these changes, then debathena-managed would become
Depends: debathena-workstation, debathena-extra-software,
debathena-auto-update, debathena-clusterinfo, debathena-tmp-cleaner
I'm sure I'm missing something in at least one of these suggestions,
so please comment.
Greg
