05-08-2012
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There are already plenty of packages to manage systems. Aside from intense scripting, there are no other options.
Frankly, I have never been impressed with any software that tries to do what yours is trying to accomplish. Any other kitschy attempts will likely break a system. You may try image based rollbacks, but realize that could be disk intensive, take up lots of space, and leave the system broken in some cases. btrfs is a way to try to fix this by taking snapshots before a patch, with the ability to roll back, however that relies on the file systems being btrfs, which is still a work in progress, and requires a boot loader that can show you the snapshots. That part doesn't exist just yet.
Aside from having generic kickstart/autoyast etc images to rebuild a machine quickly and then apply their packages again (Spacewalk, RHN Satellite, SUSE Manager) you have little use for the tool you are building. Besides, with the three items listed, they do exactly what you want to do already, and Spacewalk is free (however the built in Oracle Express is severely limited, and last I looked the Postgres version was lacking in features).
Last edited by mark54g; 05-08-2012 at 10:48 AM..
Reason: To add that the 1.7 version of Spacewalk can be run with Postgres without an apparent lack of features