Another day, another plan... or not. Regardless, I'm just going to
express my feelings at the moment: bored. Yes, I'm bored. I'm looking
at the FAI scripts and cringing at the global namespace mess it is.

"What is FAI?" you ask. Well, it stands for Fully Automatic Install,
and it's a series of BASH shell scripts used to install Debian in an
unattended way. Does it work? Yes, for what it's intended to do,
install machines. It doesn't quite work for what we want it to do,
install and maintain machines. We want to do what's called
soft-updates, a term we stole from an unfinished FAI utility script.

The features of FAI we want to take advantage of are the configuration
file scripting and the file diversions for things like installation
tools. Case in point, the update-ispell-dictionary calls
update-alternatives for the default ispell dictionary.
update-alternatives is an interactive script if not called with the
"--auto" command line option. There is no way to shut this off in a
config file anywhere. You have to divert the binary and replace it with
a null shell script, one that returns a value of '0', or OK.

The frustrating thing is that we can't tap into the FAI features without
a major rewrite of the entire facility, the entire suite. FAI is
somewhat functional in its design in that it uses a lot of BASH
functions. These functions are stored in a single file calles
subroutines and overridden in other subroutines files specific to
architecture or a site customization. Instead, these functions could be
rewritten as BASH scripts in and of their own right. We would then have
multiple tools to use or override easily that wouldn't overload the BASH
namespace environment. (Some *.deb packages use xargs in their postinst
scripts, and xargs blows up when fed too many environment
variables/functions.)

One thing I've often overlooked when trying to pursue an FAI answer to
the softupdate question is this: FAI sets up our machines to work
largely independent of any further FAI actions. We set up each machine
with a solid enough configuration that package updates could take place
without the helper scripts used in FAI. All that needs to be done is
run the "apt-get update" command, the "apt-get dselect-upgrade" command,
and loop on the "apt-get install -f" and "dpkg --configure -a" commands
until everything exits with a "0" or until a loop max is reached. (We
don't need machines to perpetually try to upgrade when there are broken
packages preventing it from happening.)

How will we push out new software selections or purge old ones? dpkg
has the ability to set package installation instructions with the
command-line option "--set-selections". I think it's time we push out
simple files to set package selections and run "apt-get dselect-upgrade
-y".

So, here we go. Time to create our own package. We'll call it
softupdate and include in the in-house utils package. Time to make it a
realization rather than a rant. We'll continue to use FAI for the
initial install, and in my spare time (yeah right), I'll help to convert
some of the FAI subroutine functions into actual shell scripts.

Time to get back to the grind.

^chewie