[colug-432] disposable systems and other ready-to-run stuff [was: Red Hat and CentOS buddy-up]

[Rick Troth]

On 01/08/2014 04:04 PM, R P Herrold wrote:
> But consider the move to cloud, and short lived, pre-built, 
> (and often) non-updatable images.  Like any appliance, having 
> all the space footprint of carring around a general purpose 
> package manager is hard to justify in some cases, and so 
> functionally 'dialing back' the manager seems an obvious place 
> for improvement.  I spoke with the lead on this at a FUDCON a 
> bit over a year ago, and the 'final best' approach had not yet 
> emerged.  The churn in 'installable image' generators reflects 
> this

An opportune observation.

For a great part of my career, I have used (or been in physical
proximity to) a particular system with *heavy* reliance on shared
filesystems. I confess to a pre-disposition in that direction. Then came
Knoppix (and things before, and things since, but it's a good example),
with the idea of a complete usable system on immutable media. Wow.

To me, the concept of a ready-to-run system, with selectable
ready-to-run packages, is simply begging for implementation (and yet
strangely difficult to *articulate*). I've seen it done, and done it
myself, but never been able to explain it. Or maybe the audience wanted
something different. Gotta think "cloud" drives up the demand for simple
and scalable. Or maybe it's still just a quaint fringe idea.

It's even compatible with RPM: trivial to apply "DB only" updates. The
ready-to-run stuff is most easily referenced by sym-linkery (to where
the apps actually reside, eg CD or ROM or NFS), and you can get 'rpm -e'
to safely remove said sym-links. There's a whole raft of possibilities.

In the near term, ya gotta build from source for this to fly. Bill Yang
well said, that's a cost center. But ya don't gotta build the whole
system to get it. (So it's variable cost, depending on what your
enterprise can/will bear.)

Probably said some of this before. Sorry. I just love it! It's way more
fun than resolving dependencies. Eewww...

-- R; <><