Poettering: Factory Reset, Stateless Systems, Reproducible Systems & Verifiable Systems [LWN.net]

Poettering: Factory Reset, Stateless Systems, Reproducible Systems & Verifiable Systems

Posted Jun 18, 2014 5:50 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Poettering: Factory Reset, Stateless Systems, Reproducible Systems & Verifiable Systems by kjp
Parent article: Poettering: Factory Reset, Stateless Systems, Reproducible Systems & Verifiable Systems

Indeed, any kind of preinstall/postinstall script in an rpm or deb package should be considered a code smell. There should be a way to declare whatever is needed and have the package manager do it intelligently, rather than running arbitrary shell commands. (The shell commands will still be needed as a last resort when you want to do something nobody has thought of yet!)

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Poettering: Factory Reset, Stateless Systems, Reproducible Systems & Verifiable Systems

Posted Jun 18, 2014 18:51 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

So now that there is infrastructure to make declarative system users possible, work has to be done to get packaging policy updated to first allow this to be used and then to make it the preferred way to do things.

As the blog says, distro policy in both rpm and deb camps might stand in the way of using this feature right now in official distro packaging. So there's probably going to be a little bit of heartburn around updating the packaging workflows and best practices. Hopefully not too much heartburn as I think the benefits are pretty obvious.

-jef