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Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by pjc50 on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @06:37AM (#9419477)
Maintaining autoconf/automake stuff is a pain. Using it is usually as simple as "configure;make;make install".

It doesn't do dependency management though, which is an externalised cost. But that's what rpm/deb do.

I see the attraction of containers and disk image based management. It's much less time consuming. But it's very much the opposite of ISO9001-style input traceability.

Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by sltkr on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @07:34AM (#9419659)
> Using it is usually as simple as "configure;make;make install".

"Usually" indeed. Because if it breaks, you do need to know the implementation details to figure out what's wrong.

Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by Jare on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @08:10AM (#9419799)
That's the same for "wget|sh", apt-get, npm or any other system. Now, if the argument is that configure tends to break more often and for more obscure reasons, I can tentatively agree with that.
Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by deong on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @11:14AM (#9421001)
This is the reason why all these standalone things bundle everything into their installation process.

The problem is installing 206 different pythons on my system just makes it more likely that something else is going to break.

Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by garthk on Thursday April 23, 2015 @07:56PM (#9430676)
… which is one of the pressures driving Docker adoption. Each process tree gets its own root filesystem to trash with its multitude of dependencies. DLL hell, shared library hell, JDK hell, Ruby and Python environment hell… a lot of it can be summed up as "userland hell". Docker makes it easy to give the process its own bloody userland and be done with it.
Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by deong on Monday April 27, 2015 @06:37AM (#9445375)
I think this falls under the heading of "I'm old", but I already have one machine to maintain. Replacing it with N machines to maintain doesn't feel like a win to me.
Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by lmm on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @11:52AM (#9421292)
I'd actually disagree with that. Auto* breaks less often than wget or npm, IME.
Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by bd_at_rivenhill on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @12:33PM (#9421602)
My experience is that "configure;make;make install" has a much higher probability of success (>95% regardless of whether you are running the most up-to-date version of the OS) than something like cmake (which seems to hover around 60% if you try to build on slightly older systems).
Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by shanemhansen on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @10:18AM (#9420564)
Sorry, I don't know what ISO9001 is, but isn't deploying an image extremely conducive to traceability? No non-deterministic scripts are ran on production servers.
Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by pjc50 on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @11:06AM (#9420938)
http://www.askartsolutions.com/iso9001training/Identificatio...

ISO9001 often turns into its Dilbert parody of bureaucracy, but the core ideas are sound: if you have some sort of failure of production, it's useful to know what went into the production process and where it came from. So in the case of deploying images, then yes: you get repeatable copies of the image. Provided you know where the image came from. Images themselves aren't usually stored in a version control or configuration management system. It may not be obvious where the image came from. And, if an image is made up of numerous "parts" (ie all the installed software), you need to know what those parts are. If an SSL vulnerability is announced, what is the process for guaranteeing that you've updated all the master copies and re-imaged as necessary?

Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by lmm on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @11:51AM (#9421283)
Have you ever seen it implemented in a way that added value? I agree that in theory ISO9001 makes sense, but it's been a slow-motion disaster everywhere I've seen it actually tried.
Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by pjc50 on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @12:15PM (#9421460)
I haven't seen it successfully implemented in the software industry. Manufacturing are much more OK with it. I'm not arguing for iso9001 itself, just that reproducibility and standardisation of "parts" are things we should consider.
Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by gthank on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @09:28AM (#9420206)
Somebody has to build the containers and/or images, and it's on them to make that an automated, repeatable process.