Re: passing installation parameters to rpm?

[Carlos Villegas <villegas math gatech edu>]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 11:02:16AM +0200, Cris Merritt wrote:
> Dear RPMers, a question:
> 
> How can I pass installation parameters to an RPM package installation?
> 
> To be more specific, I would like to manage large numbers of Linux 
> installations with RPM. Not only must I manage which packages are 
> installed on each machine, I must also manage how each installed package 
> is configured. I want to manage all this information in a database and 
> automate the installation/configuration.
> 
> For example, say I have an application Foo packaged in foo.rpm, and say 
> Foo has a config file /etc/foo.conf, where the parameter FOOHOST gets 
> specified.
> 
> Now, I want to store the correct value of FOOHOST for each system in a 
> database and use this to automate the configuration. I can have the 
> package automatically build (or modify) /etc/foo.conf, but how do I get 
> the value of FOOHOST into the installation process? I'd like my 
> management system to pass this value to the rpm --install command 
> through some channel. This channel could be a file specified on the 
> command line, or environment variables, or definitions on the command 
> line, or...

You might take a look at debconf (from the debian project), this
is in my opinion the right way to do it, I'm not sure how
easy/hard would be to implement in rpm though...

> What is the canonical way to do this?

Use debian? :)

Seriously: what most people use is either overwrite the configs
with a "configuration rpm" that uses a %post to put all the files
in place (so that they don't conflict with the package they
configure, a hack) or use something like cfengine (manage it
completely outside of the packaging system).

Carlos

PS: flames > /dev/null