[Server-devel] Building the School Server

[C. Scott Ananian]

That seems roughly reasonable.  I'll take your word for git's merge
capabilities, since the last time I hacked around in git it didn't
have any.  If I'm understanding correctly, we ship the git repo, but
the contents of /olpcconf are a checked out tree.  I hope that local
modifications to /olpcconf will be extremely rare: I'd rather put all
anticipated site-specific configuration elsewhere (/olpcsite?).
Version control of /olpcconf will exist mostly to make our lives as
developers easier.

The only part I don't believe yet (not having seen):

> OLPC specific configuration files should be separate from those
> provided with
> the package whenever possible (FC7 largely supports this).

Not sure how this works, but again I'll take the word of anyone who's
actually done this.  We certainly need to redirect some config files
to their counterparts in /olpcconf.

The only missing bit is some way to manage the actual selection and
versions of packages which make up a particular school server
"release".  I'd suggest that one of the files in /olpcconf is a
package/version list -- something like 'dpkg -l' or 'dpkg
--get-selections' on debian -- which can be automatically
extracted/given to the package manager.  This way git change history
will track when and why each package was added to our distro, and
somehow adding a package to the package list will make sure it appears
on all the school servers at their next update.  (Maybe a script to
update the 'main repo' with the packages/versions listed in the
version-controlled package list?)

I'm a little vague on pushing upgrades to the field. I assume that
redhat's usual package manager will mostly do this when we update the
main repo.
 --scott

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