Hi folks
During my discussion with Michael in the zabbix_agentd patchset thread about knowing what addon services should be running or not, it came up that it would be handy for several reasons if we had a bit more metadata for pak-files as we currently have. Mostly knowing which services (initscripts) are installed by a pak-file. This would allow for services.cgi to not have to manually try to find out if an installed addon actually has an initscript or not. Also paks like libvirt install 2 initscripts, those can now both be displayed on the services.cgi page. Idem for monitoring agents, which was my main objective.
So here is an attempt to achieve this. This is not yet a patchset to be applied yet, but rather a proposal as this change would require all addon LFS-files to be changed. But I didn't want to do that yet as this patchset may very wel be rejected completely :-).
The first patch introduces 2 new macro's: - SUMMARY for a short, one-line summary of the package - INITSCRIPTS for a space seperated list of initscripts provided by the package. And an alternative INSTALL_INITSCRIPTS method instead of the current INSTALL_INITSCRIPT method. As we now have all initscripts in the INITSCRIPTS macro, the INSTALL_INITSCRIPTS will install all initscripts listed in that macro, so a simple call to INSTALL_INITSCRIPTS will now do the job instead of multiple calls in case of multiple initscripts (for example libvirt. I noticed clamav actually uses 1 initscript for starting 2 services, this could maybe also be split up again) I included 2 examples in the first patch: libvirt and zabbix_agentd. But when implemented ofcourse all makefiles should be updated.
During the pak packaging process in the build procedure, those new macro's will be inheritted in the generated pakfire meta-* files.
The second patch adds an extra 'info <pak(s)>' commandline parameter to pakfire, which will in turn call a new Pakfire::pakinfo function. This function wil parse the meta-* file of the requested pak and functions in 2 modes: - "latest" which is the behaviour of the info parameter. This will display the latest available metadata of the pak and the status of the pak on the system as in: is it installed?, and if so, is it up-to-date. - "installed" wich will display only information about the currently installed pak and bail out of the requested pak is not currently installed. This function was added to provide a 'central' point/method to get pak information. I don't know if there are other scripts beside services.cgi that currently try parsing meta-* files. But they should then be changed to use this function instead.
Example output of the new pakfire info command: `pakfire info zabbix_agentd`: when installed and up-to-date: --- Name: zabbix_agentd Version: 4.2.6-4 Summary: Zabbix Agent Size: 250.00 KB Dependencies: Pakfile: zabbix_agentd-4.2.6-4.ipfire InitScripts: zabbix_agentd Installed: Yes Status: up-to-date --- When an update is available: --- Name: zabbix_agentd Version: 5.0.10-5 Summary: Zabbix Agent Size: 276.00 KB Dependencies: fping Pakfile: zabbix_agentd-5.0.10-5.ipfire InitScripts: zabbix_agentd Installed: Yes Status: outdated (version 4.2.6-4 is installed) --- Or when a pak was discontinued and no longer supplied by ipfire, but still installed on the system: --- Name: zabbix_agentd Version: - Summary: Zabbix Agent Size: 250.00 KB Dependencies: Pakfile: zabbix_agentd-4.2.6-4.ipfire InitScripts: zabbix_agentd Installed: Yes Status: obsolete (version 4.2.6-4 is installed) --- and at last when a pak is available, but not installed: --- Name: zabbix_agentd Version: 5.0.10-5 Summary: Zabbix Agent Size: 276.00 KB Dependencies: fping Pakfile: zabbix_agentd-5.0.10-5.ipfire InitScripts: zabbix_agentd Installed: No Status: not installed ---
And then the last patch is an update of service.cgi now using the new Pakfire::pakinfo function in "installed"-mode.
If there are any suggestions on more metadata.. I think this is the moment to throw them at me. And ofcourse suggestions/comments are welcome as this is currently only a proposal for change. But I think we win in robustness of services.cgi and user experience in both using pakfire and ability to provide available services to monitoring agents. On top of that could the whole meta-* files system be overhauled in the future, if wanted, with only pakfire itself needing change as the rest will then depend on pakfire for correctly parsing it's "database".
Regards Robin