Newbie Updating Question

[Henning Glawe]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 04:01:30PM -0800, Stephen A. Witt wrote:
> installation. I sort of understand the installation part (well, I'm
> working on it), but I don't understand the update part, unless update
> means reinstall with an updated FAI configuration. It seems that when
> updating you'd fall back on the normal Debian dselect/apt-get update
> mechanisms, or is there something that does this in FAI that I'm missing.
i did some patches for FAI allowing updates, but due to much work in my
studies there exists only a working patched version of FAI 2.3CVS. I
started to forward-port the remaining changes into HEAD but didn't yet
test them.

basically these remaining changes are the following:
- new FAI package, so all the FAI scripts are in the correct places for
  usage in a running system
- define a new task "update", which is basically "install", but skipping
  partitioning, formatting and bootstrapping

additionally to these changes, fai configuration fas to fit the task:
- conffiles in CVS (for change detection on update)
- define a hook configure.DEFAULT, which uses "fcopy -L -P -r" to copy
  all conffiles to the system, excessive usage of "postinst" for
  template substitution and on-demand daemon restarting
- scripts is "degraded" to only do what can not be done within
  "postinst"
- permanant storage of checked-out fai config on clients for later
  update detection

in all scripts, both postinst and scripts/*, you have to check if
actions have to be performed on install-time or update-time, I do this
by relying on correctly set $target ( "/" on updates ) and $ROOTCMD (
"chroot $target" on install, empty on updates ).

-- 
c u
henning