Florian Heigl wrote:
Hi Michael,
2006/12/21, Michael DeHaan <mdehaan@xxxxxxxxxx>:
David,
... SNIP ...
I think the other tasks could be worked around by having boot_shoes a
frontend pointing to either of cobbler / jumpstart / ignite /
'whatever' call or config change. on the other hand one could still do
that while running cobbler on a RHEL host, I think.
Basically, I don't want to see "if this is Solaris, do this" all over
Cobbler without there being a pluggable system in place for allowing
cobbler to be able to provision anything, in an abstract way. If such
a system existed, it would need to be able to support things like the
inclusion of the BSD's, Debian, Gentoo, and so on over time. I'm ok
with the short hacks that I made to support IA64 as they aren't
incredibly invasive, but foreign distro support would be much more
involved. Previously someone asked about FreeBSD provisioning, and
yes, it would be nice ... but I didn't get any volunteers to implement it.
Here's the real reason to say no to Solaris -- the complexity of
maintaining such an abstract multi-OS provisioning framework is immense,
and it will result in less feature development on things that can help
those who want to manage boot and update servers for RHEL and Fedora
based distributions. This is where I want to concentrate work on
cobbler -- where it can make the most impact.
I think it would be a major oversight to spend time to add
halfway-working PXE-only Solaris support when the same amount of time
could be used creating a superior provisioning solution for Fedora,
RHEL, and Centos environments. Namely cobbler should be acting as a
central hub for deployment (and yum update) needs, and it should be
concentrating on how it can do that task better.
As for things like integration with NIS (or LDAP), yes, wrapper scripts
sound like a good solution.
Hope that at least provides some insight into my thought process there
and what I see cobbler's role as.
--Michael
besides, the original mail showed how good cobbler already is at what
it does :>
regards,
florian
