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How Do You Manage a Product Based on Linux?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the penguins-in-your-products dept.

Ryan writes "Following my advice, my company has decided to base it's new appliance on Linux. So far, it's worked out great. Linux gave us a huge jumpstart on development because of it's open nature and the information we've garnered from public mailing lists. We've added software, modified startup files, and have built our own kernel. Now the question is: How do you manage it all? Do you put it all in CVS or Subversion? Do you use the distro's packaging system (we're using Debian)? What does your build system look like?"

1 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Reproducability by danpat · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you're releasing a product to the public, the one word you need to keep in the back of your mind at all times is "reproducability".
    Can you, at any point in the future, reproduce whatever version it is that customer X is having trouble with?

    There are many ways to do this, ranging from taking complete snapshots of each "build" (requires lots of space, but fast to reproduce), to keeping a short list of the Debian packages installed (not much space, but slower to reproduce). It's a classic space-vs-time tradeoff.

    I'd suggest you attempt to automate the system build as much as you can. Use virtualization tools like VMWare to help perform "builds" of your OS images. Most Linux distros have automated install processes. RedHat has "kickstart", Debian has "fai" (http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/). At the minimum, you should version control the script you use to build your vmaware images, and the configuration script for fai/kickstart. This should let you re-build everything at some later stage.

    When it comes to customising Debian systems, customised Debian packages are the way to go. If you're adding new files, package them up and deploy them as part of the automated install. If you're customising existing packages, edit their source and rebuild them with
    customised version numbers, and list those versions of the packages in your fai script. You'll need to go through the whole version control process with each customised package too. (i.e. check it's source into a version control tool, tag it, apply your changes, tag it again, then build your .deb file). You can provide "answers" files for debconf so that no questions are asked during installation, and you can tweak various settings as you go along. If you've taken the VMWare approach, you can always login to the image and make final adjustments (just make sure they're scripted and version controlled) after the Debian install is complete.

    Do a search for "customized debian", there are quite a few people doing similar things already.

    Basically, make sure that the end product requires nothing more than a button push to produce. Anything less and you'll introduce the risk of someone forgetting to perform a step, or doing it wrong. That'll create a support nightmare down the track.

    If you can reproduce easily what your customer has, you can also easily make a minimally invasive fix for them. That'll make them happy :-)

    If you're looking for resources on this stuff in general, "configuration mangement" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_manage ment) is what you want to search for. Librarianship for software systems, kind of dry and boring, but oh-so-necessary.