Re: Using Subversion for binary distribution?

Brian Candler wrote:
> On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 01:43:42PM +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>
>> PS: Have you already tried systems like sysutils/cfengine and given up
>> on them for your own reasons?
> 
> Actually, it's the FreeBSD "upgrade" process which I've given up on. Doing a
> binary upgrade leaves loads of crud around on your hard drive, and doesn't
> handle config files properly (i.e. no "mergemaster" support). Doing source
> upgrades, well, requires lots of compiling, and a lot more disk space again.
> 
> For this reason, I've migrated most of the machines I use to Linux - sorry
> :-) My laptop remains on FreeBSD (5.4), but maybe even that'll have to go
> soon.

but cfengine is so featureful and can do so many things :-) ...

There's also some other "simpler than cfengine" tools like radmind (in
ports - see http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/radmind/) and isconf
(http://www.isconf.org/) that could likely be combined with pkg_ tools, a
build host, source control for config files, etc. in order to simplify
things for a small network of machines.  I found that "out of the box"
it's easier keeping multiple FreeBSD machines synched up than it was with
Linux - though I imagine Fedora and Ubuntu have made great strides since
then. What Linux tools are you talking about? apt, yum et. al.?

ps: I also tried Colin Percival's "binary upgrade" on half dozen or so
machines and it worked flawlessly - thanks Colin! :-)

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2006-11-26-freebsd-6.1-to-6.2-binary-upgrade.html

At the time Colin pointed out that hosting one's own update/upgrade server
was not for the faint of heart. My needs were very modest though and in
most cases running "portupgrade -aPP" after the upgrade took only a few
minutes.  I haven't done this with a "reboot and upgrade" script but I
imagine it would be possible.

-- 
Graham Todd x2443