sea change
Jul. 6th, 2005 06:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sevI have new server hardware. I've had it for awhile; my users gifted it to me.
I said when I received the hardware that I was going to take the time to Do It Right, and not just copy over the old server & all its cruft to the new one. I'm still trying to do that, but things keep Getting In The Way of me getting done, so this is taking forever. SEAF. The firewall meltdown. Taking classes that ended up being much more work than I expected. And such.
And I've just made a decision that'll make it worse.
I'm not using the NetBSD package system for major services.
For all that I've loved, all these years, the convenience of having managed third-party software in /usr/pkg, the /usr/pkg/{bin,include,share,etc,....}/packagename model for complicated packages is starting to drive me nuts. I want everything that is involved in apache to be in /some/directory/httpd/.... -- not /lots/of/directories/httpd. I want my include/ directory to be paralell to my etc/ directory. I don't want to have to type cd ../../etc/httpd anymore. And I don't want to maintain symlink farms anymore in order to do it. And I want all my services that combine volatile and static stuff to live separately from the volatility of /var/ as well as the static expectations I have of /usr/. For the longest time I maintained symlink farms in /home/ so I had a reasonable illusion, since users' home directories are often combinations of very-static and very-dynamic files. But that's started to wear on me, too (aside from the symlink-farm problem), because I think of /home/ as a place for userdata, not serverdata.
And. Did you know there's a Filesystem Hierarchy Standard Group? Their arguments for a /srv/ directory sound a lot like what I just said. So, now I have a partition explicitly for "site-specific data which is served by this system." I'm tickled by this.
And trying to convince the package system to maintain major services over here and other third-party tools over there and major services with this kind of directory structure instead of the one all the package developers expect... well, that's just gotten too frustrating. And I've installed things like mailman by hand ever since I started using it, so it's not a hardship to continue doing that just because it's now included in the package system. But this'll slow down the process, some, at least in the short-term, because I'm hand-installing things that I would otherwise be able to just type 'cd /usr/pkgsrc/xxx/yyy; make install' and have it just *go*.
It just feels kind of weird. I've always lauded the NetBSD package developers for maintaining a tight ship. And they still do. And I found the /usr/pkg/ model comfortable, having been previously used to /usr/contrib from BSD/OS, which I used, well, a long time ago. It shouldn't feel this weird; it's not like I'm abandoning the package system altogether. Just not using it for a handful of apps.
This is just ... weird. Not bad, but weird.
I said when I received the hardware that I was going to take the time to Do It Right, and not just copy over the old server & all its cruft to the new one. I'm still trying to do that, but things keep Getting In The Way of me getting done, so this is taking forever. SEAF. The firewall meltdown. Taking classes that ended up being much more work than I expected. And such.
And I've just made a decision that'll make it worse.
I'm not using the NetBSD package system for major services.
For all that I've loved, all these years, the convenience of having managed third-party software in /usr/pkg, the /usr/pkg/{bin,include,share,etc,....}/packagename model for complicated packages is starting to drive me nuts. I want everything that is involved in apache to be in /some/directory/httpd/.... -- not /lots/of/directories/httpd. I want my include/ directory to be paralell to my etc/ directory. I don't want to have to type cd ../../etc/httpd anymore. And I don't want to maintain symlink farms anymore in order to do it. And I want all my services that combine volatile and static stuff to live separately from the volatility of /var/ as well as the static expectations I have of /usr/. For the longest time I maintained symlink farms in /home/ so I had a reasonable illusion, since users' home directories are often combinations of very-static and very-dynamic files. But that's started to wear on me, too (aside from the symlink-farm problem), because I think of /home/ as a place for userdata, not serverdata.
And. Did you know there's a Filesystem Hierarchy Standard Group? Their arguments for a /srv/ directory sound a lot like what I just said. So, now I have a partition explicitly for "site-specific data which is served by this system." I'm tickled by this.
And trying to convince the package system to maintain major services over here and other third-party tools over there and major services with this kind of directory structure instead of the one all the package developers expect... well, that's just gotten too frustrating. And I've installed things like mailman by hand ever since I started using it, so it's not a hardship to continue doing that just because it's now included in the package system. But this'll slow down the process, some, at least in the short-term, because I'm hand-installing things that I would otherwise be able to just type 'cd /usr/pkgsrc/xxx/yyy; make install' and have it just *go*.
It just feels kind of weird. I've always lauded the NetBSD package developers for maintaining a tight ship. And they still do. And I found the /usr/pkg/ model comfortable, having been previously used to /usr/contrib from BSD/OS, which I used, well, a long time ago. It shouldn't feel this weird; it's not like I'm abandoning the package system altogether. Just not using it for a handful of apps.
This is just ... weird. Not bad, but weird.
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no subject
on 2005-07-06 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-07-09 11:31 am (UTC)I do often wish that I had more-relational for my data when I'm the user. Just not when I'm doing admin work, most of the time. I've got two distinct modes of thinking for those two roles, and my tools reflect that.
no subject
on 2005-07-06 10:29 pm (UTC)Heh, and here's me finally giving up my beloved
.debpackages and never ever (well, hardly ever) compiling anything by hand, and switching to FreeBSD's ports tree instead, which appears to support my dream of having all binaries unstripped and built with-g.Huzzah!
no subject
on 2005-07-09 11:40 am (UTC)I may have hand-installed four things in the last week, but I've still got over two hundred pieces of software from the pkg tree, and I can't imagine giving that up.
System administration is much more complicated than it was when I was first learning, but the tasks themselves are easier. I wouldn't go back for the world -- in two days I was able to install those two hundred packages with little to no supervision. Instead of taking two days to laboriously port somebody else's code to the BSD platform, but only have six applications to install & maintain...