Custom Query (894 matches)

Sometimes, especially if you manage workstations, you don't care so much about the exact package composition at the client. You are interested only about a certain set of packages which you want to be there. Never mind the rest.

In that sense, APT and YUMng client drivers are "too curious", they insist on managing the entire package composition.

It would be very useful to have bcfg2.conf option which tells these client drives to care only about the packages which are listed in configuration received from the server and forget about the rest.

I have already prototyped this with APT driver, with following RefreshPackages()

   def RefreshPackages(self):
       self.installed = {}
       desired = [entry.get('name') for struct in self.config for entry in struct if entry.tag == 'Package']
       qcmd = """/usr/bin/dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Version}\t${Status}\n'"""
       packages = self.cmd.run(qcmd)[1]
       for pkg in desired:
           res = self.cmd.run('%s %s' % (qcmd, pkg))
           try:
               version,status = res[1][0].split('\t')
               if status.endswith('ok installed'):
                   self.installed[pkg] = version
           except ValueError, IndexError:
               pass

The result:

• Number of unmanaged entries dropped dramatically (from ~1500 to zero)
• Amount of data reported back to server dropped dramatically
• Considerable speedup in client operation

APTSource doesn't support <RawURL></RawURL> syntax (YUMSource does).

Right now I'm keeping track of the purpose of each bundle on a wiki page on our internal wiki. I think it would be handy to just keep the description included with the bundle itself, and I'm sure future tools could make use of this as well.