Getting people into Linux

[Tim]

Tim:
>> Isn't Anaconda supposed to be able to provide for that sort of thing?
>> You'd still use the same repos, but just a different installation
>> script.


Les Mikesell:
> Yes, anconda does probe and understand the hardware differences
> during an install, but it isn't involved with subsequent updates.
> Kickstart can do an initial install of a matching set of packages
> on different hardware, but then yum just updates the currently
> installed packages. What I'd like to see is the ability to put
> a large range of packages and package versions in the same
> repositories and have an ongoing ability to track package and
> package version changes to match a chosen master copy.  For
> example, if the administrator of the master machine defers a
> kernel update, pulls a few newer packages from the rawhide
> repository, and installs postfix as an alternative to sendmail,
> I'd like the tracking machines to offer to make the corresponding
> changes on their next update run. 

For a follow-the-leader thing, wouldn't you be better off if the leader
was to make a list of things to be pushed onto the followers, manually,
rather than them just copying it blindly?  Else one little experiment
would flow onto everything else.

I could imagine a nightly cron job on clients that looked for a list on
the server of things to be done with the yum equivelent of rpm -Uvh.
With some sort of serial number (ala DNS records), so a client doesn't
try to do it twice.