On 01/05/2012 07:46 PM, Ed Heron wrote:
On Thu, 2012-01-05 at 18:15 +0200, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
... It depends heavily on the ending result . If you just need a fresh machine, installing from fresh is ( was for me at least ) the fastest way. OTOH when you also have a ton of additional applications (maybe not all of them available as rpm packages) installed / configured... things might be different.
I can accept that custom applications might be easier to include in images. Creating a RPM or install script for a rarely installed program may not make the top of the priority list. However, if it is installed identically on multiple systems, it could be converted to rpm or a scripted install, which could be included in an automated clean install. As an example, I uuencode my current DHCP configuration, DNS files, firewall rules and openvpn certificates into a kickstart file to cleanly install my firewalls. Each is different but is scripted, partly in the scripts that create my kickstart files and partly in the kickstart post section.
My colleagues from the engineering dept ( I am IT... ) have to use a commercial application which comes as 2 CD images plus 3 sets of 2 isos with updates. All of which have to be installed (at last theoretically ) one after the other and only via their own Java-based installer. Guess who is not going to rpm-ize the process of installing that 8*450 MB piece of wonderful software.
And by the way, there are 50% chances that this piece of software was used in the process of design of your phone. At least if the phone was engineered after 2000.