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Two things that I would like to see in Debian. First, something more similar to Red Hat Kickstart. The Debian equivalent (Preseed) doesn't quite cut it (effec

Two things that I would like to see in Debian. First, something more similar to Red Hat Kickstart. The Debian equivalent (Preseed) doesn't quite cut it (effectively it is an "answer" file for the Debian installation, so when the questions in the installation evolve you need to regenerate the preseed config (this is my understanding, everything I've read says that it would be really difficult to make a preseed configuration by hand). Second, it would be nice if the package manager had an actual database behind it capturing everything that the rpmdb does. Instead you have a flat file with some of the data in it, and log files with other data (where the log files can be rotated out eventually). I want to be able to do things like "rpm -qa --last" on Debian. Or "yum history". How difficult would it be to write a version of the apt suite of tools that uses an sqlite db? Would that break other items in Debian? It sounds like an interesting project to take on.

m463 6y ago
I think a database to speed things up would be ok, as long as the flat text files were the truth. I wish Linus had veto'd the binary logfiles of systemd.
- derekp7 6y ago
  I think the best of both worlds would be an sqlite DB (which is extremely reliable) along with a rotated export to a flat file whenever there are modifications.
pabs3 6y ago
There is something called kickseed, which is documented on the Ubuntu wiki and seems to be available in Debian too, possibly in the Debian installer as well. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KickstartCompatibility https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KickstartCompatibility
pabs3 6y ago
The dpkg roadmap mentions a metadata tracking proposal, which seems likely to provide something like the database that you want. https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/RoadMap https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/RoadMap https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Spec/MetadataTracking https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Spec/MetadataTracking Personally I vastly prefer the flat file version, it is much easier to inspect and modify and maybe less likely to get corrupted.

m463 6y ago

I think a database to speed things up would be ok, as long as the flat text files were the truth. I wish Linus had veto'd the binary logfiles of systemd.

derekp7 6y ago
I think the best of both worlds would be an sqlite DB (which is extremely reliable) along with a rotated export to a flat file whenever there are modifications.

pabs3 6y ago

There is something called kickseed, which is documented on the Ubuntu wiki and seems to be available in Debian too, possibly in the Debian installer as well. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KickstartCompatibility https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KickstartCompatibility

pabs3 6y ago

The dpkg roadmap mentions a metadata tracking proposal, which seems likely to provide something like the database that you want. https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/RoadMap https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/RoadMap https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Spec/MetadataTracking https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Spec/MetadataTracking Personally I vastly prefer the flat file version, it is much easier to inspect and modify and maybe less likely to get corrupted.