Open Stack

On 16/04/14 05:53, Thomas Spatzier wrote:
> IMO, it would be desirable to not have things like yum or apt appear in the
> template explicitly. For many packages it seems like at least the top level
> package names (not including distro specific versioning strings) are equal
> across distros so when specified in a template it should be possible for a
> software deployment hook (which can be distro specific) to figure out how
> to install the package.

I think this thread demonstrates the opposite: package names can be 
different even among closely-related distributions (Fedora vs. RHEL) - 
or even versions of the same distribution (Fedora 17 vs. 18). And while 
Ubuntu is derived from Debian (and thus most apt packages are likely to 
share package names), there's no reason whatsoever to expect e.g. 
OpenSUSE to have the same package names as Fedora, despite both being 
based on RPM.

Brian Aker once suggested to me a scheme based on the path to the thing 
you want installed: e.g. you request /usr/bin/httpd and the agent uses 
"yum provides" or the apt equivalent to install the appropriate package. 
That's an idea that might work better, although paths are by no means 
standardised across distros either.

In any event, though, my impression is that we are trying to get out of 
the cfn-init business as much as possible and leave the task to some 
combination of custom images, software config and configuration 
management. Hopefully someone will correct me if that impression is 
inaccurate...

cheers,
Zane.