Re: A rosetta stone of package names?

[Tim Post]

On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 22:23 -0400, Allan Clark wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 21:27, Tim Post <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Rather than maintain a version for each distribution, I hope to just
> > write macros that output pre-installation scripts.
> 
> 
> Sounds more like when you make a plugin available, you also port the
> plugged-in module to the target.

To a degree. We store the data for text configurations in a database
(such as Apache's configuration) which permits much cleaner and safer
writes.

All we need to know is the location of the files and
directories.. /etc/apache2, /usr/local/apache, etc.. This approach saves
us a lot of porting headaches. It also makes writing plugins like
virtualization controls much easier.

Once installed, we account for pretty much any distribution quirk. Its
just getting the darn thing installed that has me burning brain cells.

The proprietary software that we hope to replace has very very buggy
support for every distribution but RHEL/CentOS, we hope to succeed where
they got stuck.

> Alternatively, to try a slackware-on-the-fly, the URL pattern:
> 
> http://freshmeat.net/projects-xml/{proj}/{proj}.xml

Yes, I was considering digging freshmeat when/if a package can not be
found via a query with the package manager. 

> I still agree with the other posters that this is a dangerous ( == support
> issues and unknown breakage) path to take, but it's all yours, and maybe
> you'll show it to be not-so-scary.

It is scary. Its sort of a tough call .. maintaining 10+ versions of the
same thing or trying to make it distribution agnostic by nature. Given
the push for synchronized and frequent distribution release cycles, it
would be madness for the three of us to keep up.

Either route just seems icky. Luckily I have ~2 months to come up with
something :) Thanks again to all for the suggestions and insights. Of
all the possibilities, trying to do this with autoconf seems the most
likely to succeed.

Regards,
--Tim

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