You’ll often hear SysAdmins advocate writing a script for any task you expect to repeat more than once, and I couldn’t agree more. Over the years, I’ve often found myself taking it a step further, and packaging anything I expect to install more than once, or install in any production environment. There are a lot of benefits, but mostly I find the added server consistency and conveniences of the package management tools make up for any extra effort required in bundling it together.
Of course you could do the same thing with your own custom scripts, but I don’t like reinventing the wheel and I really like the extra integration of using the same system as my OS. So what makes a good packaging system? Here’s my list:
- Versioning
- Robust dependencies
- Able to upgrade and downgrade packages
- Pre-install, Post-install scripting
- Binary packages - my preference, definitely not a hard requirement
With that in mind, consider this the kick-off to a series on effectively building and mixing your own packages with your OS distribution of choice. I’ll be focusing on RPMs as the package type on RedHat / Fedora Linux distributions, but the patterns should work well with other RPM based distributions, and probably apply to other packaging systems as well.
Series index
(will turn into links as series is written)
- Introduction to RPM
- Building Basic RPMs
- Working RPM management software
- Patterns: Building configuration packages
- Patterns: Replacing vendor RPMs
- Patterns: Building RPMS for “trouble” software
- Conclusions?
