[Mageia-sysadm] planning for sysadmin task

[Thierry Vignaud]

On 30 October 2010 10:55, Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org> wrote:
>> At some extent, RPM dependencies would be a useful thing for setting
>> up the application but this mostly happens once (first install) and
>> can be easily hosted within the web application itself (and then
>> handle the error) - WordPress and Drupal do it for instance.
>
> It also prevent the removal of used dependencies.
> This can happen either when we are cleaning the server, or when we
> upgrade the server, or another application.

(Please quote!!!)
Indeed. Last example was ganglias which was broken on mdv bs b/c
it seems it was installed as a tarball instead as a package and got
broken when someone cleaned up some deps which rpm couldn't
know were needed by not packaged stuff

>> So we can discuss this further with other future webteam members but I
>> will seriously not manage a production environment that goes through
>> packaging for app updates.
>
> Well, if creating a package is just a single command ( as would be a
> upgrade to the production server ), I do not think it will be much of a
> problem. The only issue is to find someone skilled enough to create a
> shell script for that and I do not really think that it will be a big
> problem. We have a team of 8 admins and there is several volunteers
> eager to help, it would be quite weird to have no one able to do it in
> time.

What's more, MDV example shows that we should go for the simpler
usage, aka using packaged web apps that got security updates.
Just look at kenobi that hosts a web server and was running for years
an outdated distro
with no more updates, where nobody cared that web apps got broken, and the like.