On Mon, 28 Mar 2022 15:25:03 -0600, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli wrote: > - Part of the files in /etc/ and/or in other parts of the system comes > from packages that come from a [config] repository. These packages > are generated from a configuration management tool named holo. We > currently use a patched version of holo[1].
Ugg, you're reminding me that I didn't just go AWOL from Parabola, I went AWOL from Holo. I/we should definitely endeavor to get those patches upstream. (I ended up becaming a significant contributor to Holo, but only after I'd already started using it on my Parabola boxes.) > Questions: > ---------- > - What is the license of the packages? Is there a way to at least get > the configuration files under a free license? There are also scripts > like common.sh that lack licenses. Also I didn't found the > sources of the files used to generate the package repository, so I > would also be interested in that. It's https://git.parabola.nu/server/config.git/ I'm the only committer to that repo, but I'm not sure it's accurate to say that I'm the only author--it started out as me "documenting" what was already there on the servers. Also, I don't recall quite what the status of this was, but what I was working toward is that https://wiki.parabola.nu/Hacking:Servers be generated entirely from running `./doc` in that repo. I think it was pretty close, at least for the winston.parabola.nu section. I forget if I ever set up a post-push Git hook for config.git that had it `cd /srv/config.parabola.nu && ./build` or if I manually SSH'ed in and did that whenenver I pushed. Anyway, as far as I am concerned my contribution to config.git is public domain. > - Why do we need a configuration management tool to generate the > packages? Would migrating the packages generated by holo to more > standard PKGBUILDS inside abslibre in a separate config repository be > a good idea? So far I found several advantages in doing that: We aren't using `holo-build`; just the core of Holo--they *are* standard PKGBUILDs. Well, they `source common.sh` which is a few shell functions that I found useful for writing config-oriented PKGBUILDs. Aside: config.git's `./build` script uses `art`; `art` isn't anything terribly special, it's just a tool for conveniently building all of the packages in a directory and sticking them in a pacman repo (it understands not just vanilla PKGBUILDs, but also `holo-build` files, but we don't care about `holo-build` files). So what Holo does for us is provide a pacman post-install hook that gives us a way to patch files owned by other packages. For example, we want to configure the `/etc/collectd.conf` file, but that's owned by the `collectd` package. So `config-parabola-base-collectd.PKGBUILD` instead of including an `/etc/collectd.conf` file which would conflict, includes a `/usr/share/holo/files/10-config-parabola-base-collectd/etc/collectd.conf.holoscript` which is a shell script that takes the stock collectd.conf on stdin and uses sed and awk to emit our modifications to it on stdout. > - It would make the packages less obscure: developers that already > know how to contribute changes to packages will also be able to > contribute changes to the configuration of the Parabola servers in > this way. That should generally still bet true; just that they're in config.git instead of abslibre.git. > - It will also result in having the configuration mirrored by all > the Parabola mirrors so they will be backed up, so if the Parabola > main server is destroyed we would for sure find mirrors with that > configuration, and the packages will also be signed. 1. The *are* included in https://winston.parabola.nu/backup/ (are the backups still encrypted to my GPG key? :grimmace:) 2. And also mirroring config.git should be sufficient for backing these things up. -- Happy hacking, ~ Luke Shumaker _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list Dev@lists.parabola.nu https://lists.parabola.nu/mailman/listinfo/dev
