Dear TBSs,
I've been asked to make a summary of the situation with the installation
tools in LCG.
The situation
=============
This was extensively discussed in 2 session at the last EGEE conference.
In the future there will be a transition from purely LCG components to
gLite components.
gLite components come with their own installation and configuration tools.
There is an xml configuration file for each service you install with all
the possible configurable paramaters in it. Some of the paramaters have
default values some don't. To configure the system there are python
scripts.
What does this mean for us?
===========================
CERN wants, after a transition phase, scrap YAIM simple key-value confg
file+bash in favour of this new xml+python tools.
At the beginning they might wrap gLite configuration into YAIM so that we
keep on our nice interface and get use to xml+python and after that remove
YAIM completely. They don't want to keep the YAIM wrapping on the
ground that it makes it more diffcult the tracing and debugging and they
don't want to rewrite the python tools.
The people in the pre-production testbed got used to xml+python and had
comments only on too many parameters to configure and the xml file in need
to be reorganised because as it is is confusing.
Where you can find the talks
============================
Pre-production testbed presentation
http://indico.cern.ch/sessionDisplay.py?sessionId=28&slotId=0&confId=a0514#2005-10-27
Deployment tools session
http://indico.cern.ch/sessionDisplay.py?sessionId=49&slotId=0&confId=a0514#2005-10-27
Why am I telling you all this?
==============================
We'd like to hear what you think first because I will hopefully have the
possibility to expose it with the developers and Graeme is going to give a
talk at the LCG computing review on the 14th of november at CERN.
Any opinion?
I'll spare you mine but I'm against this change. If I could I would avoid
it, but we can perhaps at limit the damage.
cheers
alessandra
--
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* Dr Alessandra Forti *
* Technical Coordinator - NorthGrid Tier2 *
* http://www.hep.man.ac.uk/u/aforti *
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