Interesting, and probably worth a play with indeed, although I tend to steer clear of Bash (unhappy with) whenever possible to do the same in Perl (happy with). I imagine there is machine level stuff involved that would rule out a pure Perl version? However, my difficulties for OS replacement are not so much the OS setup itself but the 'production' stuff that needs to go on top and a raft of dependencies -- compilers, BerkeleyDB, myriad Perl modules etc etc etc. Since the system is 'live', I usually have to run 2 versions in parallel for a long time... so lots of rollbacks, synchronising overhead and so on. Usually newer versions of some things have to be replaced with older versions and then inter-dependency issues arise... some of the stuff I upgraded specifically for suddenly stops working. You are familiar with the general picture, I'm sure. But thanks for the thought. Sean
<div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">On Fri, 17 Dec 2010, Sean wrote:
To: centos@centos.org From: Sean soso@orcon.net.nz Subject: [CentOS] two cents or not two cents
Hello Producers
"Longevity of Support" is an attractive drawcard for CentOS if it means the exact opposite of Fedora's "short support cycle" that does not provide updating of infrastructural libraries for very long, libraries which newer versions of applications (like Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera etc) depend on and which wont install unless the libraries are also newer versions? But is that what it means -- ie that those infrastructural libraries (libpango, libcairo etc) are continuously updateable to fairly recent versions?
If so, the problem is in reconciling that meaning with the reputation of CentOS to only support older versions of applications (eg Firefox-1.5, Thunderbird-1.0 etc). It does reconcile, of course, if the implications are merely that the CentOS user must compile and install the later versions of such applications from source, rather than having the luxury of pre-packaged binaries. It doesn't reconcile if there is some other critical reason why newer such applications just wont install. But which?
I ask here because the profusion of vague mission statements and 'target-enduser-profile' claims that litter the internet re '*nix distros' seldom actually address those real issues. And hopefully someone can enlighten. My complex production & developement desktop takes months to fully port to a new OS (or OS-version), so OS updates to get library updates (ala Fedora philosophy) becomes increasingly untenable.
You might be interested in giving my ALI scripts a whirl on a spare machine (even an old laptop) to start with, so you get used to how they work.
I wrote these especially to deal with doing a fresh linux installation.
http://www.karsites.net/centos/anyuser/auto-linux-installer.php
I can set up the services I want running in under 10 seconds. Beats sitting there doing it manually for 3 days!
The general idea is that you modify the installer scripts to work with a particular system - just do it one time. Then you can replay the scripts as often as you want, to re-install your system.
Please let the list know if they help with your installation/update woes.
BTW. Some applications such as Firefox need to be updated to their latest versions, otherwise websites will not work with an older version. I had these issues with running an old version of FF on Fedora 8. I went from F8 to F12 using my ALI scripts without any problems.
Kind Regards,
Keith Roberts