Subject: Re: Meta/Hierarchical packaging?

From: Rob Browning <[email-masked]>
Date: 15 Jun 1996 11:25:59 -0500

[email-masked] (Amos Shapira) writes:

> Got the idea?  Any comments about it?

This kind of thing has been discussed a little, but the discussion was
postponed until after the 1.1 release.

--
Rob

---

From: Rick Hawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 1996 12:05:28 CDT

I've been thinking of something along these lines, too:

I'm trying to install packages on a machine, but doc & man stuff on a
separate machine as a server.  It isn't working well so far :)

I've had reasonable luck linking /usr/doc and /usr/man pages to the nfs
host, but the predictable bad things happen when i then try to install
packages--all kinds of error messages.

Should i be setting the permissions for /usr/doc & man to  777?

Also, there are some programs that i want to leave on the server--man,
info, gcc and the like for those that don't have room for it locally,
etc.

I just don't quite understand the proper configuration for these, and
how /bin/local interacts, etc.  can someone straighten me out?

(yes, i know that the solution is big disks, but this is to convert old
machines that the department woudl otherwise lose.  

(and yes, we're blessed :)  our old machines are 486/33's . . . I'm not
sure there are any 386's left in front line use here . . .)

(but they only have 80mb drives, though they'll frequently get a second
. . .)

---

From: [email-masked] (Amos Shapira)
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 1996 21:48:04 +0300

Hello,

I wander if there is any work being done to make Debian packages
easier to manage and to fine-tune.

What I'm thinking about is something like SGI's "inst" tool.

SGI's tool provides, for each package (e.g. X11) a list of sub-packages
which may be selected from it, things like:

x11.motif.man
x11.motif.lib
x11.motif.extra

And applying an example to the debian environment:

perl5.base.man
perl5.base.bin
perl5.modules.www.man
perl5.modules.www.bin

xntp.server.bin
xntp.server.man
xntp.doc
xntp.client.bin
xntp.client.man

Cheers,

--Amos

--Amos Shapira                    | "Of course Australia was marked for
133 Shlomo Ben-Yosef st.          |  glory, for its people had been chosen
Jerusalem 93 805                  |  by the finest judges in England."
ISRAEL            [email-masked] |                     -- Anonymous

---

From: [email-masked] (Martin Schulze)
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 96 19:46 MET DST

You write:

}I've been thinking of something along these lines, too:

}I'm trying to install packages on a machine, but doc & man stuff on a
}separate machine as a server.  It isn't working well so far :)

}I've had reasonable luck linking /usr/doc and /usr/man pages to the nfs
}host, but the predictable bad things happen when i then try to install
}packages--all kinds of error messages.

It seems that you have problems with installing packages, right?
Packages are installed with uid=0 aka root, right?  NFS normally
sqashes root (i.e. translates uid=0 to uid=63336 for example).
Therefore you can't change permissions and the like.

Could you check out if that's the problem?

}I just don't quite understand the proper configuration for these, and
}how /bin/local interacts, etc.  can someone straighten me out?

What do you mean?

}(and yes, we're blessed :)  our old machines are 486/33's . . . I'm not
}sure there are any 386's left in front line use here . . .)

Oh, lucky guy.  My machine for creating .deb files is a 486SX-25 :)

Regards,

	Joey
-- 
  / Martin Schulze  *  [email-masked]  *  26129 Oldenburg /
 /                 Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only /
/          proved it correct, not tried it.  -- Donald E. Knuth /

---

From: Rick Hawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 16:29:37 CDT

> Could you check out if that's the problem?

happily, but what am i looking for/checking?

also, i made some progress, sort of .

For the doc, info, man, & games, dirctories, i used 

  chmod -R 777 doc info man games include

Most documentation then installed properly.  THe exception was perl,
which gave permission denied messages regarding removing symlinks.
Other docs, though, happily created & filled the directories they needed
to live in.

> }how /bin/local interacts, etc.  can someone straighten me out?

I assume that /bin/local is inherently local.  What i'd ideally like to
do is have the nfs directories mounted at the same points as the local
disk, so that i don't need large amounts of links & mounts.  For (at
least) reading, i'd like to be able to have a tree of mixed local/served
files, recognizing that different combinations fo files will be
installed on different machines (extreme example:  some may7 want gcc
served, while others want it locally . . .)

also, i'd like to make links so that it thinks that remote packages are
installed for dependecny purpoises.  (i can probalby figure this out
once i get to the right combination of dpkg-deb --help, i suspect.  i
think i just need to figure out where they're stored.).

midway through typing this, i got a bit more working, which has left me
even more confused:

on the "server", the second hard drive is put into the file system as
/hdb2 (truly creative name :).  I then created doc, info, etc. on it,
and symlinked these back into the primary file system.  /hdb is also an
export.  

THe other system mounts /hdb as /server, and has symlinks to /server for
doc, info, games, etc.  THis works fine, and with the 777 permissions on
the host, lets most installs put their documentation where it needs to
go.

For executables in games, though, i've found it necessary to actually
mount rather than use symlinks.  So i have 

 mount -t nfs pc3138.econ:/server-pc3138.econ/usr.lib.games /usr/lib/games
 mount -t nfs pc3138.econ:/server-pc3138.econ/var.lib.games /var/lib/games

which allows nethack (my test program) to work just fine.
I don't think it should be this complicated, though (or should it?)

> Oh, lucky guy.  My machine for creating .deb files is a 486SX-25 :)

if only they were mine :)  right now i have two down in a basement lab
to play with to show that this is going to work.  And i'm trying very
hard to control myself and not buy my own linux system . . . exector
runs the important files in my mac collection (word 5.1 & excel 4.  hmm,
what about hypercard?), and my wife wants a color computer for the kids
. . .

rick