Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Hamish Greig <hgreig AT bigpond.net.au>]

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On Wed, 4 Feb 2004 14:37, Casey Harkins wrote:
> This is entirely possibly just as spells. I recently upgraded all of our
> Linux desktops to (a perverted version of) SourceMage. The installation
> process went something like this:
>
>         1) install from iso (configure net and hostname)
>         2) scribe add mycustomgrimoire
>         4) sorcery system-update
>         5) cast workstation (from mycustomgrimoire)
>
> workstation was a "metaspell" just like the gnome/kde profile spells. It
> depended on a number of other spells, some of which were more "metaspells"
> that had POST_INSTALL's to copy configuration files in after its
> dependencies (the real spells) were installed.
>
> In addition I have 2 other top level "metaspells" for desktops: laptop,
> standalone. Each have some small differences, but all depend on a common
> desktop metaspell which depends on all the standard requirements for our
> desktop machines (xfree, icewm, openoffice, mozilla, java, cups, etc).
>
> Instead of desktop directly depending on icewm, it had a dependency on
> myicewm (the names were actually based on our company initials not the
> stupid my prefix). myicewm depended on icewm and copied custom icewm
> configuration files from the spell directory into /etc/icewm. There were
> other spells that did this as well (cups, wdm, rox, etc).
>
> Our printers were even handled this way. All the desktop machines had cups
> installed (because the desktop spell depended on it), but the printers
> were different on many of the machines, but not always (for networked
> printers). So, one spell got created for each possible printer that could
> be hooked directly to a machine, and one for each network printer. Casting
> 'lj8550gn' for example would automatically add the LaserJet 8550 GN to
> cups.
>
> On top of *all* of this (here comes the perversion part), I actually used
> a single machine as a "reference"  machine which built all the spells used
> and created a custom binary grimoire for all the spells used. I wouldn't
> recommend the binary approach quite yet, it is, and still proving to be a
> pain right now.
>
> Anyway, this is kind of a long-winded response, but I believe the current
> system is capable of this. Anyone could create a grimoire with spells like
> this (webserver, ftpserver, mailserver, etc) which simply depended on the
> spells it needed and did the configuration in POST_INSTALL.
>
>
> -casey

Could someone please handcuff casey to a SMGL workstation ?
Casey, love your work and want more of it !

If I am to successfully change our ISO to a set of binary cache tarballs 
instead of the monolithic image.tar.bz2 I will come up against some of the 
same dependency problems you must have encountered.
At some convenient time (read later, post 1.0) I would love to discuss some 
ideas with you, things like a wrapper around the cache tarball that lists 
it's depends, so a form of resurrect can be used to satisfy those depends 
more easily.

Hamish
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