Thesis-SZPL
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Thesis work: managing GNU/Linux in Small & Medium sized Enterprises
Hi, i'm Peter Laszlo Szabo, student of SZTE, and below is my planned thesis work on Frugalware. Please, do not edit this page. You're welcome to leave comments on the -dev list or the discussion tab.
Intro
The word "enterprise" sounds bells for some users, and a sinonym for "bloated sh*t what i don't need". Really, this is because extending capabilities of a distro beyond the home user level means to support a more diverse and challenging environment, which is paired with market pressure to do it a profitable way, and under these circumstances Bad Things (tm) might happen. In my interpretation the meaning is "do a bit more, make it better", and development will take place in the traditional "Frugalware spirit". In the title "enterprise" is mentioned, but elementary and high schools, libraries and other non-profit organizations share the very same needs - efficiently administer a bunch of workstations.
Scenario
These are worst-case assumptions, better things will perform better.
- Computers: 3-250 networked desktop clients, and an organization with the desire to use it for its everyday regular operations.
- HW configuration: the PCs are old, PII-400 with 128Mb RAM, integrated VGA+sound+networking and 10G HDD.
- The staff: in most of the time overburdened (has more things to do than they can finish in normal pace). Planned things can be undertaken if the time and effort is known. They are not FW speciali sts (no gdb, strace, pacman internals, repo management knowledge), but are able to properly report bugs.
- Network: 100Mbit/s self-managed LAN network is assumed, with at least 1Mbit/sec connection to the internet.
Needs
- A comprehensive, well-organized and up-to-date reference documentation for the whole system
- A predictable upgrade path
- An up-to-date list of the known issues, possibly with the workarounds
- Advanced network support from the installer (L7 proxies, vlans, secure wireless )
- Central management facilities for: users, logging, package distribution, configuration changes
- Fully automated install (you put in the CD, later a fresh configured installation boots up)
Action items
Part I - The learning curve
a, Rearrange the documentation into user/admin/devel/sections, write some chapters [Asciidoc user guide]
- - split into user, admin, dev sections
- - summarize what is duplicated
- - fix makefile and other stuff that got broken
b, bug triage
As of 07.12.23, there are 192 open tasks as 'bugs' in Flyspray, some from 2005.
- - purge version-specific bugs older than 2 releases (tagged as 0.5 or before) as outdated
- - revised bug handling: there will be 2 versions to report bugs for, a release and a current (both contains a version number), reporting bugs for 0.x-current will require posting the git version number from the running OS, which will be provided by pacman when hooks will be implemented (about 0.8-pre2).