Small debian based server distribution

[Amos Shapira]

2010/10/28 Elazar Leibovich <elazarl at gmail.com>:
> I'm curious, since I'm having the very same problem on CentOS/RHEL. There
> are many basic packages which just doesn't exist in the main repository
> (say, python 2.6) and I'm not sure how to add them in a nice way to the
> distro.
> Currently I'm just `make install`ing it from the source, but it has all the
> downsides you mentioned.

rpmforge, epel and rpmfind (or google "package-name rpm") are your friends.

Just configure them as additional yum repositories, rpmforge even
provides a basic initial rpm to do just that for you.

We also build our own rpm's when we can't find them and of course for
in-house software. Once you get the hang of it and setup a build
environment it's a no-brainer.

If you maintain servers based on packages from extra repositories then
I recommend maintaining your own local mirror of the subset of
packages you need, so there are no nasty surprises if/when they update
a package in an inconvenient time for you (e.g. in the middle of
updating multiple servers which should be identical and with a
verified version)

And again - for servers consider Puppet to control what goes there.

--Amos