[thelist] sanctifying GNU software(was misspelled as 'Re: [thelist] sactifying GNU software' and it really bugged me)

spinhead evolt at spinhead.com
Wed Oct 31 11:08:45 CST 2001


Indeed it is. We need to strike a balance between anarchy and dictatorship.
Auditing, recordkeeping, awareness - that's the ticket.

spinhead


----- Original Message -----
From: "Garrett Coakley" <garrett at polytechnic.co.uk>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 4:30 AM
Subject: Re: [thelist] sanctifying GNU software(was misspelled as 'Re:
[thelist] sactifying GNU software' and it really bugged me)


> On Tue, 30 Oct 2001 17:55:47 -0800, "spinhead" <evolt at spinhead.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> > I'm much less afraid of GNU stuff on *nix boxes than I am upgrading to
> > the latest version of MS Office, so the point here isn't that I think
> > anyone's going to break anything; it's primarly a due diligence thing,
> > in case something DOES break.
>
>
> Right, gotcha. You're looking at more of an audit trail sort of thing.
> Maybe audit isn't the best word, more a "best practice" set of
> guidelines so you can trace back where a breakage might have occured?
>
> With stock redhat installs RPM is pretty effective at managing
> dependencies and install locations, it's also available for Solaris
> IIRC. That might be one way to track things. (http://www.rpm.org).
>
> If you can say to them "install away, but can you do it through RPM
> instead of direct from source" that would clear up some of the possible
> problems. They could build their own RPMs from tar.gz files and then you
> would have access to the RPM database to see what exactly they were
> tinkering with.
>
> Hell, you could even set up a small machine to build the RPMs for them
> and then mount it on all the machines via NFS.
>
> Anyway, hope thats in the general area of advice you were looking for.
>
> G.
>





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