[tahoe-dev] Debian packages?

[bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 08:21:15AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> 
> Olivier Schwander <olivier.schwander at chadok.info> writes:
> 
> > Yes, you may run multiple tahoe instances using different user id but I
> > think it's still a good idea to provide a system wide installation, with
> > a specific user and specific data and config dirs (if you look at apache
> > for example, you are still able to run your own custom apache with a
> > custom config, even if the package provide a system-wide configuration).
> 
> That's reasonable, but there should not be a system node unless
> requested and set up.
> 
> I agree that it's also reasonable to have system config in /etc and data
> someplace where data is expected to be (but it may be very large, so
> typically one thinks about which disk and where there is space).
> 
> On my systems, I put nodes in /n[012]/TAHOES/gridname-hostname-diskname, and
> run them under the 'tahoes' user (for tahoe server).  To me, the node
> config is minor and the data storage location is the real question.
> But others may prefer FHS compliance to that.
> 
> So it sounds like there are 1, maybe two enhancement requests:
> 
>   add a variable storage_dir= to the config to have the storage
>   directory be other than $node_dir/storage
> 
>   very maybe, script support to start multiple tahoe nodes under
>   specific uids, maybe based on a /etc/tahoe-nodes.config global config
>   file that has uid/dir pairs.   This is perhaps best added by
>   packagers, but I suspect it's easy enough to write in POSIX /bin/sh
>   and be portable to all Linux and BSD variants, at least, and maybe
>   more.

A configuration system like the one provided by the openvpn Debian package
could be the way to implement that simply: 

/etc/default/tahoe containing a list of nodes to start automatically.

Each node configuration would lie under a /etc/tahoe/$NAME directory,
owned by the right UID/GID with correct permissions, storage_dir key being
automatically set to /var/lib/tahoe/$NAME, again with the right UID/GID
and perms.

The init script would source /etc/default/tahoe, check each node
configuration dir in /etc/tahoe/ and its UID/GID, start each node with
the right options and owners.

bert.