[16878] in athena10
Re: One man's perspective with Debathena
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Fri Oct 4 18:41:46 2019
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In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1910041742130.69156@neural-implant.mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 18:40:52 -0400
Message-ID: <CADwaeHfwWqQOLSHdP2HoA95ehWWJ=KVi82bWLJPWGo0pB3c6bQ@mail.gmail.com>
To: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@mit.edu>
Cc: Myron Freeman <fletch1@eecs.mit.edu>, debathena <debathena@mit.edu>
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On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 6:15 PM Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> It's probably not hard to fix debathena-thirdparty to install on 16.04 and 18.04, given someone with the right knowledge and a little bit of time.
Honestly, I wouldn't put effort into it. That package was always a
nightmare, and it's sole purpose was to track things that 3partysw
wanted installed everywhere. The complexity around it was to avoid
having separate manual lists that got out of sync when we supported
multiple versions. So while it's easy-ish to build a new version by
editing the overlay package lists, the list of things added to
thirdparty hasn't been touched in 5 years. For a single version, in
a small environment (e.g. an EECS cluster), I'd just install a list of
packages -- this can be as simple as "apt-get install -y $(cat
list-of-packages.txt)" as a one-time command.
> I have no idea what, if any, additional work the login-graphical or workstation meta-packages would need on 18.04.
logic-graphical was primarily bout providing the greeter, and making
GUI apps play nice with an AFS homedir. The only really important
stuff was in debathena-xsession, which provided an xsession script
that did the right things around shell initialization. Much of
login-graphical can be thrown away these days, I imagine.
Workstation was login-graphical, plus auto-update,
moira-update-server, clusterinfo/larvnet, etc.
If we were doing this today, and had the luxury of mostly ignoring
"private workstations" (workstations in offices that IS&T nominally
supported) and clusters, I'd rip out of a lot of legacy stuff, and
drastically simplify the graphical login environment. We put a lot of
effort into ensuring that our user base could still use their 1998-era
dotfiles and still log in, which was a mistake.
>
> Jonathon
>
> Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@mit.edu>
> MIT/IS&T/Cloud Platforms
>
>
> On Tue, 24 Sep 2019, Myron Freeman wrote:
>
> > I’ve been paying attention to your recent emails about Debathena and making some things work for 18.04 so I thought I should talk about where I stand with Debathena on my EECS cluster machines.
> >
> > Currently I’m still running 14.04 on EECS cluster machines since that’s the only one that supports debathena-workstation and debathena-thirdparty. I have a few machines running 16.04 with debathena-workstation but no debathena-thirdparty since that metapackage doesn’t work under 16.04. And I would love to know what folks did do make Debathena work for 18.04 on the dial-ups.
> >
> > I need to meet with IS&T to know what, if anything, they intend to do with Debathena in the future. As one of you basically said in a previous email, I’m not doing anyone any favors by still running 14.04. I’d love to have debathena-workstation for 18.04. I most likely need debathena-login-graphical to be usable in the EECS clusters. Most of all, I need to figure what’s going to happen with Debathena so that I can figure out what to do for the labs.
> >
> > This is where I stand at the moment.
> >
> > -Fletch
