On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 11:01:28AM -0500, Les Mikesell enlightened us:
> Matt Hyclak wrote:
>
> >>>There is, use a baseurl in your config file rather than the mirrorlist.
> >>But that's a per-box per-repo specific change, with per-distro, per-repo
> >>variations for the end users to figure out for themselves. And then it
> >>won't fail over at all if the url you pick goes away. Aren't computers
> >>supposed to work for you instead of the other way around?
> >
> >You can't please everyone. I'd argue that the majority of people are not
> >behind a proxy of any sort.
>
> And I'd argue that the majority of Centos installations have more than
> one copy in locations that could easily use a common proxy. I'm not
> sure how to prove that, but it makes sense for an 'enterprise' OS.
>
I don't disagree, and if those folks have enough machines, I bet they're
setting up local mirrors.
> >I'm assuming you are using a transparent proxy
> >such that you don't have to configure proxy settings on every box - so I
> >won't argue that point.
>
> No, I just let the shell export the setting when it is useful:
> http_proxy=http://proxy.domain.com:3128 yum update
> I can update one box, test things, then ssh that command in a loop to
> any number of boxes in locations where the specified proxy will help.
> With Cento3 it works great and the subsequent runs are almost instant.
>
And looping an scp command is harder how?
> >Regardless, tools like puppet, or simply providing .repo files for folks
> >makes it fairly painless to make those changes for end-users.
>
> Those look like extra work to me. And you have no fail-over if you
> force a single repository url. A better scheme would prefer to use a
> one based on location but still retry elsewhere if that fails.
>
baseurl allows for more than one URL to be defined, so add in 2 or three
mirrors. Or read the yum mailing list where the priority setting was
discussed when combining baseurl and mirrorlist just today.
> >Yes, computers should work for you, however you can't expect the software
> >to
> >read your mind and do what you think it should do.
>
> Reading 'my' mind wouldn't be all that useful because I don't know the
> right answer either - and if I knew something today it would probably be
> wrong tomorrow. What we need is a way to compute the best URL that is
> repeatable when requested by the same proxy unless that one is no longer
> available.
>
> >Some amount of
> >configuration is necessary on *any* computer - why is this different?
>
> This is different because we usually see progress going in the direction
> of more and more automatic configuration with better designs. In this
> case Centos3 had it right and has since regressed in design. I realize
> that there were reasons for the change, but there still has to be a
> better way.
It seems your definition of better and the developer's definition differ.
They are making the configuration more automatic for most of the people. For
those that need to install/update multiple machines, you have several
options. If you have that many machines, you're doing some sort of
management anyway so it really isn't a stretch to ask you to change your
.repo file along with your mail configuration, web server configuration,
etc.
Matt
--
Matt Hyclak
Department of Mathematics
Department of Social Work
Ohio University
(740) 593-1263
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