On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 01:25:15PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
I have a need to include external xml stubs in my control xml. Ideally, these stubs will be generated during a pre-script, and later included for things like disk partitioning, package selection, X configuration, stuff like that.
Hi, I came to the conclusion that it is hard to check (a la xmlint) rule-based scripts as the rules get expanded at installation time. Another point that annoyed me was that the whole thing is basically one big xml-file which can be hard to edit. Although xml has the possibility to use include-directives it looked to me that it only works with absolute urls but not with relative. There is now also a new mechanism to include configuration files with the <location>-Tag iirc, but i suspect still not a relative path mechanism. Other point was that I did not really grasp how to get "classes" work. Thus I also tried the generator approach, generating the the configuration-data (on the fly) by a php-script running on the webserver (autoyast=http://..). As with php it is also easy possible to access databases, so it was not to hard to put the parameters of the hosts of the domain into a database. That php-script uses the ip-address it gets from the webserver as a key to access the data in the database. With php I could also make kind of templates for configuration-files containing php-tags which makes configuration quite compact and flexible. The rule-based thing i realized with a few if-diectives based on the parameter i get from the database. Another advantage was that the include-mechanism with php works with relative pathes. So now here the source for every a configuration file or script whether it is a php-template or not is just a seperate file. In order to xmllint easy the output of the php-install script I implemented a mode to start php-directly on the script-file where I pass the ip-address in question as parameter in. Two questions remain open to me. It would be nice to have a configurator to adapt configuration (cfengine or red carpet) after the installation which works on the basis of the same host parameter-data (database). Currently i don't do that. Second one is one has to get some parameters of hosts in advance. There are other possible limitations with that textbased configuration script. I don't see a mechanism to quote directly xml- or php-like tags in files. Other experiences I made. It is impossible to create easely a configuration files of size zero bytes with the <files> mechanism (except with script), It is impossible with the <files> mechanism to run only a script on a file but not to put some data in advance into it. It is impossible trivially to create a configuration file at a place where the directory has to be created in advance. Am I wrong? Greetings, David
Basically I'm a Kickstart admin, and I've written a python script that examines a system and some install time arguments and generates the above things on the fly according to our internal formulas. I need to replicate this system for SUSE installs using autoyast. Is this possible?
-- Jesse Keating RHCE Pogo Linux -- Linux Systems Engineer tel: (888) 828-7646 ex: 436
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