Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Casey Harkins <charkins AT upl.cs.wisc.edu>]

And now you've got me thinking...


I agree that something like this could be useful. While a single 
"mailserver" setup is not going satisfy the majority of mailserver setups, 
if someone(s) wants to create/maintain/support one this could work really 
well. Whether its hosted on sourcemage.org doesn't really matter.

First of all, a top level "metaspell" like I described would need to be 
written (as I described in the previous message). In the POST_INSTALL a 
dialog based, or even more complicated ncurses configuration interface 
could be launched to collect some information relevant to the setup of 
that type of machine. This program could be installed for modifying 
configuration at a later time (similar to netconf). 

This "metaspell" along with all the spells it depends on could be packaged 
up into its own grimoire. Using a small amount of scripting, changes in 
test/stable would automatically propagate to this new grimoire. The 
maintainer would really only need to keep the metaspell and configuration 
program up to date. 

Once the iso creation stuff is down to a simple scripted process, a custom
installation iso could be created based on this grimoire instead of the
usual stable grimoire. The installer (which in my dream world will have
automation capabilities soon) could be modified to auto-partition and
chroot cast the "metaspell". Now there is a single iso which automatically 
installs this pre-configured package complete with allowing it to be 
configured in the installer. 

This could possible even go one step further with an SMGL live cd creation 
script which could just create a live-cd for this pre-configured package 
where /etc, /home and /var are accessed on the harddrive (automatically 
launching an installer if these partitions aren't there when booting). Now 
you just download an iso, boot, configure and put your data/users on the 
machine. Want the latest security updates, just download the new live-cd 
and boot it!

I really should be working....

-casey