Bazaar for CM (was: understanding shared repo and push)

[Davis, Jacob]

Hello Gavin,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: bazaar-ng-bounces at lists.canonical.com 
> [mailto:bazaar-ng-bounces at lists.canonical.com] On Behalf Of Gavin Carr
> Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 9:04 PM
> To: bazaar-ng at lists.canonical.com
> Subject: Re: understanding shared repo and push
> 
> I've been doing something similar to this with tla/bazaar for 
> a while now, pushing via rsync. One variation I use is that I 
> have a top-level all--etc tree and then have separate 
> host--etc branches off of that, so I can make common changes 
> at the top and have them inherited to individual hosts.

I was just thinking of how to handle that scenario. Your solution sounds
great.
Cold you elaborate briefly on your process for creating and then keeping
the branches in sync with the top level etc?
 
> The main reason I aren't using bzr for this yet is 
> permissions tracking, since bzr only captures the execute bit 
> at the moment, I believe, where tla/bazaar record all 
> permissions and group ownership, I think. Are there any plans 
> to broaden the metadata support in bzr? I realise it's not 
> particularly important for the development use case, but for 
> configuration management it can be quite important.

Good point. I will be mindful of this limitation.

> You should also be aware that pull vs. push is a nice 
> religious debate in the configuration management community. 
> Push is easier and more direct for small setups, but pull 
> seems to scale better and have better handling of transient 
> errors (e.g. what happens if you push to all your machines 
> and 2 of them are
> offline?)

I can certainly see pros and cons to both sides.
For the time being, I find the simplicity of the push method to be
compelling.
It seems that building in some sort of per-host verification of the
update could be fairly straight forward.
My initial thought is that perhaps a simple wrapper for "bzr commit" or
a plugin could be used in the central repository to log/report any
failures.

Cheers,
-Jake