[LUNI] Testers wanted: apt on Red Hat Linux 7.1

[Simon L. Epsteyn]

> Why would you want NOT to install the security fixes that have come out in
> the last year?  For that matter, why would you not have updated the
> installed base with them long since?

For example you have a cluster on a private network :)

Actually I wasn't talking about security updates, sometime updated packages 
are "bug fixex", but if it's working fine for me, there is no way I am going 
to update production machines.

> At this point in time, it's been some years, so most of it is secondhand.  I
> didn't like the lack of a package manager - the user-interface half of it,
> as I discussed last time.

Weel, since 6.2 (or 7.0) there is up2date, which works just as well as apt, 
it has downsides, you have to register, etc.. Hence apt-rpm, which works 
just fine, so that's not a problem with Red Hat :)

There has been autorpm for a while, however I dislike it mostly, it doesn't 
provide apt or up2date functionality completely.

I like apt, since I can have a local mirror to use, instead of central one.

> My last experience was helping a friend get ssh installed - it wasn't in
> the official release, which was shocking.  (this was recent enough that
> Debian had had OpenSSH in main for long enough that I couldn't imagine
> living without it, but I'm just not sure when exactly it was)

As soon as US legal restictions eased up and they had a chance to verify 
that it became part of the distribution, even before that you could get 
most "offical" ssh rpms from redhat.de

> If I did I guess I'd just duplicate the disk image and then make the few
> machine-specific changes (machine name, IP address if static) by hand.  
> If I had a roomfull... well, I haven't gotten around to looking at
> parted at all closely, but I think it might help.

It turns out that in 2 cases my dept needed this functionality, this is 
exactly what we did (one: toms root/boot, fdisk, mkfs, tar, lilo, other: 
boot from a network, run an "install" script), but there are groups at work 
that do use automated install functionality, I personally like for other 
reasons as well.

For example, you could answer some, but not all questions, say DNS server 
and NFS source.  That way a user doesn't need to remember where to install 
from just, partition/select packaes.

/Simon