TurnKey Linux's take on Ubuntu appliance development: KISS

[Carlos Ribeiro]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 13:11, Liraz Siri <liraz at turnkeylinux.org> wrote:

> > Tim Hawkins wrote:
> >
> > Perhaps the approach should be to create an application that allows you
> > to turn the data you have created on an appliance into a package, so you
> > can reinstall it ontop of another freshOS/appliance install when it
> > comes time to upgrade.
>
> According to the policy, Debian packages don't touch user data. Lots of
> things depend on that and if you break the rule you'll get burned.
>

There's a distinction between "Debian packages don't touch user data" and
"applications provided by Debian packages may touch user data". For example
WebMin does that - as do cPanel and other control panel applications, not to
mention many scripts that tune iptables fw & qos settings. (and I think we'd
already agreed on that).

> If each appliance package came with a metadata file that described where
> > all the relevant user data is stored, or how to find it via the
> > appliances configuration, then such a tool could be feasible.
>
> The suggested implementation is not the way to do it, but I like the
> idea of an automated tool that makes appliance development easier by
> packaging the changes a developer made on some sort of SDK appliance.
> Maybe eventually we can figure out how to get TurnKey to auto-generate
> reproducible deltas ...
>

I like the metadata idea. If the metadata format is flexible enough, it
could be used to map settings that reside text files, specialized
registry-like databases or XML files. And using it to generate deltas is a
great idea too.

-- 
Carlos Ribeiro
Consultoria em Projetos
twitter: http://twitter.com/carribeiro
blog: http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com
mail: carribeiro at gmail.com
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