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.