Extra packages
Extra packages refers to the facility whereby teaching staff can directly, and without the involvement of CSG, control the installation and removal of standard Debian packages from user-loginable New World lab computers, login servers and VLAB servers[1].
/usr/local/extrapackages is a directory on New World, user login-able hosts which contains two types of Debian package lists:
- Lists of packages to be installed (*.pkglist), and
- Lists of packages to be removed (*.purge)[2].
- Each file is a list of package names, one per line,
- The package names cannot contain the version - any that do will be ignored,
- The packages will only be sourced from Debian's own repositories. No other repositories will be searched,
These lists are maintained by teaching staff who have rsync access to the same-named directory on the cfengine hub and from whence the cf-agent on each client copies the lists. See also extra files.
On the clients, when any of the lists change the agent firstly attempts to install all the listed packages (but, of course, those already installed will be skipped), and then attempts to remove/purge the correspondingly listed packages (and, of course, those not present will be skipped).
Users can see what's happening in the package department by looking at the /var/log/apt/history.log file on a client host.
See cfengine hub, master files extrapackages.inc.
Footnotes
- ↑ This is a cooperative deal between CSG and teaching staff where teaching should endeavour to only install/remove packages that have to do with teaching -- such as editors, language compilers, development tools and other applications -- and not interfere with packages which support the operation of the host as a platform such as the Linux kernel, etc.
- ↑ All other file extensions as well as subdirectories are ignored.