[Mageia-sysadm] planning for sysadmin task

Tue Nov 2 10:42:59 CET 2010

On 30 October 2010 10:55, Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org> wrote:
+>> At some extent, RPM dependencies would be a useful thing for setting
+>> up the application but this mostly happens once (first install) and
+>> can be easily hosted within the web application itself (and then
+>> handle the error) - WordPress and Drupal do it for instance.
+>
+> It also prevent the removal of used dependencies.
+> This can happen either when we are cleaning the server, or when we
+> upgrade the server, or another application.
+
+(Please quote!!!)
+Indeed. Last example was ganglias which was broken on mdv bs b/c
+it seems it was installed as a tarball instead as a package and got
+broken when someone cleaned up some deps which rpm couldn't
+know were needed by not packaged stuff
+
+>> So we can discuss this further with other future webteam members but I
+>> will seriously not manage a production environment that goes through
+>> packaging for app updates.
+>
+> Well, if creating a package is just a single command ( as would be a
+> upgrade to the production server ), I do not think it will be much of a
+> problem. The only issue is to find someone skilled enough to create a
+> shell script for that and I do not really think that it will be a big
+> problem. We have a team of 8 admins and there is several volunteers
+> eager to help, it would be quite weird to have no one able to do it in
+> time.
+
+What's more, MDV example shows that we should go for the simpler
+usage, aka using packaged web apps that got security updates.
+Just look at kenobi that hosts a web server and was running for years
+an outdated distro
+with no more updates, where nobody cared that web apps got broken, and the like.
+