On Thu, 17 Sep 1998, Matthias Drochner wrote:

> The pkg system does not well if parts of the filesystem
> are shared among a number of machines.
> Somehow the different sorts of installed files:
> -shared, arch-independant
> -shared, arch-dependant and
> -individual
> must be accounted for separately, within the corresponding
> filesystem, to get this right.
> Otherwise, a diskless client will eg keep claiming that it
> doesn't have a compiler, even if I install one in the shared
> /usr from the server.

I can see that sorting out files which are MI/MD and which are
shareable/not-shareable is something that would need thinking about.

I'm not sure that the package database wrt diskless clients is a problem
though. A diskless client doesn't need to "know" that it has the
compiler installed - it just execs cc and either it works or a "file not
found" error happens! Surely it is only the package tools themselves
that need to check things like dependendancies, and in the case of a
cluster of diskless workstations package install and removal should only
be running on the file server, surely?

Regards,

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Neil Hoggarth                                 Departmental Computer Officer
<neil.hoggarth@physiol.ox.ac.uk>                   Laboratory of Physiology
http://www.physiol.ox.ac.uk/~njh/                     Oxford University, UK
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+