Package manager

[karellm]

Hi,

I'm looking into the different provisioning systems and I really like Sprinkle. After giving a shot to Chef and Sunzi, Sprinkle actually feel like the right balance between features, complexity and support.

However, it seems to lack a package manager at first glance. Is there anything like librarian-chef (https://github.com/applicationsonline/librarian) or remote recipes (https://github.com/kenn/sunzi#remote-recipes) in Sprinkle?

Thanks,

[joshgoebel]

You can find a lot of git, but I think really you're supposed to build your own. I mean most common things have OS level packages so a package is really just apt "blah"... might be neat to find a nice way to expose the distro specific installers from the recipes directly without having to create single line packages.

[joshgoebel]

Or by package manager you mean a remote list of packages you can access - no nothing like that.

[karellm]

I indeed meant an equivalent of bundler for packages. You can provide the git repo, ref and it will take care of compiling your /packages directory for you.

Unrelated question: I find the documentation very poor (well inexistent...). Thankfully there are some good blog posts out there but am I missing something? For instance I can't find anything on how to deploy without Capistrano.

Thanks for your help.

[joshgoebel]

There are great comments in the source... read the source or generated rdoc. Raw SSH works quite well. Examples in the comments/rdoc as I said already.

Thanks,
Josh Goebel

On Sep 11, 2012, at 3:26 PM, Karel Ledru-Mathé notifications@github.com wrote:

I indeed meant an equivalent of bundler for packages. You can provide the git repo, ref and it will take care of compiling your /packages directory for you.

Unrelated question: I find the documentation very poor (well inexistent...). Thankfully there are some good blog posts out there but am I missing something? For instance I can't find anything on how to deploy without Capistrano.

Thanks for your help.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[joshgoebel]

There has been talk of an official package repository, but not anything like a Gemfile where you could just pull packages from all over... I don't think that type of approach works will without static sources anyways... I'd hate to go to bundle install and suddenly all the sprinkles I linked to aren't there anymore. And if you're just fetching them once and then sticking them into packages a much simpler approach would probably work.

[joshgoebel]

Did you see the example directory?

[joshgoebel]

Another issue is multiple OSes... i"m not sure we should have ubuntu packages right next to OpenBSD packages all in one huge repository...

[stuartellis]

FWIW, I started putting together a repository of reusable packages, and found that almost all packages were OS-specific, so quickly ended up creating a "debian" directory for Debian/Ubuntu and a "generic" directory for the cross-platform ones. I also thought about having a separate directory for source installation packages, but that's not something I usually do myself.

[joshgoebel]

I imagine if we go that route we'd have a sprinkle-packages gem... but when you included it what would you get? anything? Or would you have to then require 'debian/web/apache' or such? I think it'd get slow loading and parsing 100s of packages.

I'm using Sprinkle heavily in more than one platform.

I also need a place where packages and configurations can be shared, so I had the idea was to organize all my recipes (and others I took from Internet) on a single GitHub repository and build a Web interface on top of Sinatra to generate customized scripts (pretty much the same way JQuery UI allows me to build a custom .js package).

Now that I see this discussion, I created the repository to tell you a bit more about my idea. Hopefully you'll find it useful and give me comments.

https://github.com/hagarelvikingo/sprinkle-packager

Regards,

Rodrigo.

[stuartellis]

@yyyc514 - I hadn't thought about gem packaging before today, but as I mentioned on issue #48, my first thought is to deliberately avoid the question by just providing a method for people that want gems to build their own.

@hagarelvikingo - I also thought about this after tinkering with a system that involved reusable packages, and filed issue #48 a long time ago to see if there was any interest. @yyyc514 replied to this recently and we've been discussing it more on that issue.

My incomplete system was this:

https://github.com/stuartellis/spritz

This was intended as a template Sprinkle project for people to fork and use on their deployment machines, rather than a central repository, but I quickly hit issues about how to organize the packages.

[stuartellis]

I ought to say that I'm happy to contribute to whichever the "right" repository is, however it is maintained.

@hagarelvikingo - I've read your README, and it sounds really good.

One thought - having a searchable system ideally requires some simple convention for putting metadata inside the package files. Fixing properties like category ("database") in the directory names might cause issues later. Maybe even the OS version shouldn't be there. For example, many packages won't be specific to a version of the OS, and new Ubuntu versions will keep coming every six months...

@stuartellis you're right. But I think nobody will want to build a database. Perhaps some rubydoc-style or jsonified documentation on what it provides, what it requires, which version is it and what package manager it supports. Thank you for your insights.

[stuartellis]

@hagarelvikingo - I agree. That's what I was thinking, something like a hash or structured comment header would be enough.