The only comment I would have is, obviously, that there's a lot to be said about having one set of auto-install tools and spec's, as opposed to having the platform specific flora we have today. At least for the people, like myself, that has to maintain several platforms from different vendors (not very unusal I guess), it would be a great time saver. To my understanding, YaST (including autoyast?) has gone open source. Why not have a look at merging the two in to one, then covering the tripplet Redhat/Fedora/Suse, and then try to make it spread to other platforms/venors as well? R /Lars Stavholm Erik Sjölund wrote:

Just wanted to drop a note about a somewhat related project.

http://xml2hostconf.sourceforge.net ( GPL-licensed )

It is used to generate kickstart files for RedHat/Fedora. And it generates RPMs consisting of configuration files.

Autoyast have the Classes/Rules system. Xml2hostconf tries to solve the same problem with RPM dependencies and "kickstart-groups".

Some differences:

* autoyast is SUSE specific, xml2hostconf is RedHat/Fedora-specific ( I don't know if it is possible to modify xml2hostconf to generate some autoyast configuration )

* xml2hostconf, is not only used for things at install time. When it generates configuration RPMs, already installed systems will also get them by way of yum or apt-get. This means you don't have to reinstall a system to get the new configuration files!

* xml2hostconf lacks the "Rules" functionality of autoyast. There is no such rule processing at install time. The configuration for each host is generated in advance.

* xml2hostconf lacks a gui.

* xml2hostconf lacks most of the "configuration and installation options" of autoyast ( http://www.suse.de/~nashif/autoinstallation/9.1/html/configuration.html ). xml2hostconf only handles what a kickstart file can do. The rest is left to the system administrator to put in post-install scripts and in generated configuration RPMs.

Comments?

cheers, Erik Sjölund