[CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

Fri Sep 17 21:12:29 UTC 2010
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 9/17/2010 3:30 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>>
>>> All I'm saying is that it often turns out to be a whole lot more work
>>> than the initial 'configure, make, make install', so you either have to
>>> train the users to do their own copies in their own space so it will
>>> scale, or be very careful about how much of this you take on.  And I'm
>>> saying this from experience.  It's not much different from writing your
>>> own code where the initial cut is about 10% of the work of maintaining
>>> it - and if the upstream project goes away or takes a direction not
>>> compatible with your use, that's where you end up anyway.
>>
>> Having spent far more of my career as a software person, let me say that
>> what I've installed not from rpms or other packages has been nowhere
>> near as much work as writing it... esp. when you factor in creature
feep, er,
>> feature creep, and "oh, I meant this, not *that*...."
>
> I think it is pretty hard to draw a line between code and custom
> configuration and what you have to do to keep them working as other
> things change.  For example I once ran smail with some custom tweaks to

My experience has been different. When I'm working as a developer, it's
*all* development. When I've installed some software for someone, it may
be a pita to install, but then I only once in a while have to go through
that again, and the next time, I know most of the things that need doing.
Not something to take up most of my week.
<snip>
> If you have different users needing these things on the same machine you

Um, no. Our users, or teams, each have a number of servers:  dev, test and
prod.
<snip>
> You might have run into the CPAN issue if you installed something like
> RT in the Centos 4 era.

Ugh. When I was with AT&T, 3-4 years ago, we looked at RT, and blew it off
for Mantis, which was *much* easier to work with.

Hmmm, or was there some other project management software I installed.
<shrug> It's been a few years, and I ain't there with notes.

         mark