[Devel] vzpkg

[Kir Kolyshkin]

Also see my comments below.

Robert Nelson wrote:
> Is anyone actively working on vzpkg?
>
> I've been rewriting it to eliminate the dependence on yum and rpm, so 
> that it also works for Debian and hopefully some day Gentoo.  This 
> also eliminates the requirement for vzyum, vzrpm, vzrpm43 and 
> vzrpm44.  vzpkgadd, vzpkgrm, vzpkgls and vzpkgcache would just do the 
> right thing.  This would also fix the incompatibilities between 
> working with packages from the HN and from within the VE.

That sounds interesting, do you have a git repo or something I can take 
a look at?

So, how are you solving the problem of different RPMDB versions? You 
know, if you have used rpm-4.2 to create/manage an RPM database, the 
moment you use rpm-4.3 on it will become incompatible with rpm-4.2. The 
only way to fix that would be to use only specified RPM version.

We can definitely use rpm from inside a VE only, but then another 
problem of duplicate downloads arises.

> Is this something that you would like to incorporate into the product?
>
> One of the things I noticed was that there was a lot of duplication in 
> scripts and data files.  This is because everything is stored in an 
> OS/Version/Platform/Config directory, even though there may not be any 
> difference between the corresponding files between platforms or even 
> Versions.
>
> I have a change which is backwards-compatible which allows config 
> directories anywhere in the template tree.  Files lower in the tree 
> override any specified higher in the tree.
>
> For example, instead of this directory structure:
>
>    /vz/template
>       centos
>          4
>             i386
>                config
>                    minimal.list
>                    yum.conf
>                    ...
>             x86_64
>                config
>                    minimal.list
>                    yum.conf
>                    ...
>
> You would have:
>
>    /vz/template
>       centos
>          config
>             minimal.list
>          4
>             i386
>                config
>                   yum.conf
>                   ...
>
> This eliminates a lot of duplicate work and is less error prone.
Will the minimal.conf in /vz/template/centos/5/i386/config/minimal.list 
be an addition to, or a replacement for 
/vz/template/centos/config/minimal.list?

In case it's addition, say you have a package called httpd in 
/vz/template/centos/config/minimal.list. What if in CentOS 6 we don't 
want package with that name, but want something called httpd3 instead? I 
mean, we can definitely add more packages, but how can we "remove" packages?

In case it's a replacement, I doubt that "generic" file will work -- 
every major version of a given distro have some changes in the minimal.list.
>
> I can provide a diff of this change against the current git if you are 
> interested.
>
> If there is interest in any of this work please let me know the 
> process for getting the changes reviewed and incorporated into the 
> product.

I put users@ to cc: in order to bring some more attention to the topic. 
I am definitely interested so let's discuss it further (for now my 
biggest concern is rpmdb compatibility problem described above).