During my 12.1 bughunt, I (re-)encountered some inconsistencies that
I've been wanting to ask (and nag) about since I started working with
autoyast a few years back, and a few new ones:
1. autoyast generates a lot of messages.
For an autoyast dev, this might be wonderful, but dumb users like
myself are simply lost in tens of thousands of messages. It makes
finding errors in the logs really hard, especially when you don't know
what string(s) you're looking for.
It would be great if there was, for example, an additional
warnings-and-errors-only log.
2. autoyast generates a lot of "noise" in diffs.
When cloning a system with yast or editing it manually and then
running it through yast again to check for errors, yast changes the
profile in various ways. This makes it sometimes harder to see the
"real" differences. (In general, one could say everything is fine
because the inconsistencies below all "converge" towards a final
state, but nevertheless I sometimes wonder why these things happen.)
2.a) (this is new in 12.1 and did not happen before:) for some reason
the DNS settings are not kept for stage 2, so I need this script in
12.1:
<script>
<debug config:type="boolean">true</debug>
<feedback config:type="boolean">false</feedback>
<filename>fixresolv</filename>
<interpreter>shell</interpreter>
true
<source><![CDATA[resolv=$(cat /etc/resolv.conf)
if [ -z "$resolv" ]; then
echo "# resolv.conf was empty, ftfy.
nameserver a.b.c.d" >> /etc/resolv.conf
fi
]]></source>
</script>
2.b) is _always_ deleted by yast.
2.c) even though a <runlevel> section exists, the package
yast2-runlevel is not automatically installed.
2.d) even though mail settings (aliases, mailrelay) exist, the package
yast2-mail is not automatically installed.
2.e) When *cloning* an existing system, I see inconsistent and
sometimes non-helpful behavior. What happens is that for certain
settings (see below), there are different cases that can happen:
1. tag doesn't exist vs.
2. tag exists but is empty vs.
3. tag exists with default/cloned value
Of these three, only the last one is really helpful because I can
actually see what value the cloned machine had set. Some of the
settings where I have seen this in 12.1 are:
<languages>, , ,
,
, ,
, , ,
.
I have only had my eye really close on the
section, the behavior was like this:
* random existence of default value or empty tag (this happened
for both the complete section or parts of it, depending on which parts
of it were set to the default on the cloned machine)
* if it did exist with empty values, yast (sometimes) deletes
(some of!) those tags
* if it did not exist, yast (sometimes) inserts (some of!) those
tags with the default (non-empty) values (but *only* if the whole
did not exist. if only parts are missing, these
are not inserted)
In the two former cases (no tag/empty tag), the user has to remove
them from the profile, run it through yast again, and only then will
the values appear (or it will not be added again by yast and wasn't so
important anyway).
2.f) While the sections in the profile seem to be sorted alphabetically by yast,
1. the order of <users> seems to be random,
2. the order of the <*packages> and <*patterns> sections seems to
be nonrandom, but isn't nonalphabetic either.
Does the order of these sections matter? If not, could the please be
sorted deterministically (alphabetically, or, f.e., in order of UIDs
for the users)? Right now, when comparing different profiles, the user
has to do a lot of "merging" first before he/she can see the real
differences.
It would be really great if the debugging possibilites in autoyast
would be improved. They've been a source of frustration to me over the
last weeks.
That all sounds so negative. Let me end with a big thank you to all
contributors: Thank you. autoyast saves me a lot of time. (:
--
Kind regards
686f6c6d / Christopher 'm4z' Holm
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