Interesting, and probably worth a play with indeed, although I tend to
steer clear of Bash (unhappy with) whenever possible to do the same in
Perl (happy with). I imagine there is machine level stuff involved that
would rule out a pure Perl version?
However, my difficulties for OS replacement are not so much the OS setup
itself but the 'production' stuff that needs to go on top and a raft of
dependencies -- compilers, BerkeleyDB, myriad Perl modules etc etc etc.
Since the system is 'live', I usually have to run 2 versions in parallel
for a long time... so lots of rollbacks, synchronising overhead and so
on. Usually newer versions of some things have to be replaced with older
versions and then inter-dependency issues arise... some of the stuff I
upgraded specifically for suddenly stops working. You are familiar with
the general picture, I'm sure.
But thanks for the thought.
Sean
> <div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">On Fri,
> 17 Dec 2010, Sean wrote:
>
>> To: centos@xxxxxxxxxx
>> From: Sean <soso@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Subject: two cents or not two cents
>>
>> Hello Producers
>>
>> "Longevity of Support" is an attractive drawcard for CentOS if it means
>> the exact opposite of Fedora's "short support cycle" that does not
>> provide updating of infrastructural libraries for very long, libraries
>> which newer versions of applications (like Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera
>> etc) depend on and which wont install unless the libraries are also
>> newer versions? But is that what it means -- ie that those
>> infrastructural libraries (libpango, libcairo etc) are continuously
>> updateable to fairly recent versions?
>>
>> If so, the problem is in reconciling that meaning with the reputation of
>> CentOS to only support older versions of applications (eg Firefox-1.5,
>> Thunderbird-1.0 etc). It does reconcile, of course, if the implications
>> are merely that the CentOS user must compile and install the later
>> versions of such applications from source, rather than having the luxury
>> of pre-packaged binaries. It doesn't reconcile if there is some other
>> critical reason why newer such applications just wont install. But
>> which?
>>
>> I ask here because the profusion of vague mission statements and
>> 'target-enduser-profile' claims that litter the internet re '*nix
>> distros' seldom actually address those real issues. And hopefully
>> someone can enlighten. My complex production & developement desktop
>> takes months to fully port to a new OS (or OS-version), so OS updates to
>> get library updates (ala Fedora philosophy) becomes increasingly
>> untenable.
>
> You might be interested in giving my ALI scripts a whirl on a spare
> machine (even an old laptop) to start with, so you get used to how
> they work.
>
> I wrote these especially to deal with doing a fresh linux installation.
>
> http://www.karsites.net/centos/anyuser/auto-linux-installer.php
>
> I can set up the services I want running in under 10 seconds. Beats
> sitting there doing it manually for 3 days!
>
> The general idea is that you modify the installer scripts to work with
> a particular system - just do it one time. Then you can replay the
> scripts as often as you want, to re-install your system.
>
> Please let the list know if they help with your installation/update woes.
>
> BTW. Some applications such as Firefox need to be updated to their
> latest versions, otherwise websites will not work with an older
> version. I had these issues with running an old version of FF on
> Fedora 8. I went from F8 to F12 using my ALI scripts without any
> problems.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Keith Roberts
>
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