Misguided - NOT!

Misguided - NOT!

Posted Jul 18, 2006 17:27 UTC (Tue) by evgeny (guest, #774)
In reply to: Misguided - NOT! by hazelsct
Parent article: The end of the multiarch era?

> So that one can use a package manager on the PPC server to install the amd64 and ARM packages and serve them all up to the various clients properly.

There is no reason why a package manager shouldn't be able to deal with packages for another arch; this has nothing to do with the multiarch OS support. Did you mean perhaps the multiarch support for your favorite package manager?

> Imagine being able to "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" and have all three arches upgrade at once.

Heh, you've got quite a bit of imagination... Not to mention many technical details why it'd never work correctly (at least with the current apt), are you serious you want to have the _same_ OS on the server and clients?! And what about _several_ different thin client images? (In my case, a RH-7.3 box simultaneously serves releases of Slackware, Ubuntu, and Knoppix thin clients; users tend to be picky about their favorite distro...).

> (Can't do it in a chroot because the binaries won't run

There is no need to use chroot for that. Just give one NFS client (e.g. your own workstation) a temporary r/w acces and do all the upgrades from it.

> -- not to mention the wasted space of the duplicated -common packages.)

So now you're talking about NFS-exporting the root file system of the server?!

C'mon, NFS has a notorious track record of security holes (and is inherently insecure anyway). And, 90% of the client disk space would be due to the GUI apps which shouldn't be installed on the server.

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