Deploying and maintaining your software with RPM/APT

He gave a very good overview of rpm/apt. The first step to make our own ubuntu packages. I very nice person to listen.

About your question at the end of your talk.

We make indeed packages but those are Solaris packages but we are going to migrate some virtual servers to Ubuntu.

All are packages are installed into: /opt. We don't want to mess things into /usr/* or /bin/* . It's also much easer to make a tar, to backup it. Much easier if you want to delete those packages afterwards. Maybe, you get questions, hmm, are those binaries ours, or are those installed by the system.

Let me take an example. Tomcat is installed into:

/opt/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.29-01 As you can see, we are speaking about version 6.0.29. The last 2 digest (01) is our version number. If we made changes, we make a new package and installed it in:
/opt/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.29-02 and so on. We never update packages to the same folder, always new packages and new folders.
All are config, logs, libraries, bins, .... are in the same directory and some have symbolic links to other directories.

/opt/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.29-01# ls -l
...
logs -> /var/log/tomcat

You never need to know which folders the package are installed in. Only 1 folder.

In the package we installed also some config files who don't change much. Other configuration (stored in svn), would be rolled out by puppet.