On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Steffen Moeller wrote: > To me DebTags are a way to describe > software packages. A main motivation to have these tags, if I recall > correctly, is to filter packages when presenting them to users to make them > select software for local installations.
Perfectly agreed. But you was talking about clusters and I doubt that any user is presented the list of packages based on DebTags to install a cluster. >> Well, you mentioned that you want to do this but I have never seen giving >> you any reason for this or any advantage you want to gain by using this. > > The advantage is the adaption to complex workflows. I see no way that system > administrators can prepare all tools well in advance and all database and > update them all in time. No way, even for some constrained field like > biological sequence analysis. This statement obviousely shows that you had not yet looked into FAI. I guess Thomas Lange (FAI author) would smirk brightly if he would read this. :) Moreover I continuosely fail to see in how far this will be changed by implementing deeper DebTags hierarchy. > Maybe the admins get in sync for the first > users and agree on some setup, they will not do it for the 205th. And they > should not. So if you need a tailored runtime environment for your tasks, > then you need some way to get it established dynamically. Now, every cluster > participating in a, e.g., campus grid can allow arbitrary installations or > they could be constrained differently for each cluster. But you are describing local need of a campus that could never been implemented in DebTags. FAI just has this kind of classification and was build for exactly this reason. > DebTags would appear > like a very reasonable language to constrain and describe packages. I don't think so in the sense you mentioned above but in a much more general sense. DebTags-devel people might correct me if I'm wrong. > This has something of a hen-and-egg problem. We have this file here: > http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-med/trunk/community/debtags/tags?op=file&rev=0&sc=0 > which features many facets, badly lacking descriptions, still. We could come > up with an extension of that format (or it may be existing already) that also > assigns the affected packages for each term. With a certain number of > assignments we would ask for their adoption by debtags. Would this sound > reasonable? At least I will not stop you in trying. ;-)) Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de _______________________________________________ Debtags-devel mailing list Debtags-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debtags-devel