[debian-lan-devel] Maintaining Debian LAN as a set of packages

[Afif Elghraoui]

Hello,

I was wondering what your thoughts would be on maintaining Debian LAN as
a set of packages, sort of like how the Debian installer is maintained.
In the Debian LAN deployment I am helping out with at my site, I've
slightly been customizing debian-lan-config to be this way.

For example, I am thinking about the following source/binary packages:

* lan-installation-server

* lan-directory
  - lan-directory-server
  - lan-directory-client

* lan-files
  - lan-file-server
  - lan-file-client

...and so on. This would move many of the files and scripts out of the
FAI configuration and into class-specific packages. We can make use of
the debhelper plugin config-package-dev for modifying or replacing
configuration files (while diverting the originals) provided by existing
packages (like dhcpd.conf). A profile can be defined as a metapackage,
which can keep machines properly configured with regular apt
dist-upgrade/autoremove via cron.

I find that a major advantage of using the package manager for
configuration rather than the typical configuration management system is
that it's very simple to *undo* configurations without necessarily
having to define a reverse operation or reinstall the system.

I'm looking forward to your thoughts. I'd be happy to join the team and
help implement this if you agree.

Many thanks and regards
Afif

-- 
Afif Elghraoui | عفيف الغراوي
http://afif.ghraoui.name