Making Packages After "make install"

[chiznibitz]

I’ve been kicking around this idea for a bit now, and I wanted to get some feedback from the older and wiser admins on this site.

Say you have a server. You install Mac OS X Server. You build and install some open source software. Now, for whatever reason (humor me), you want to be able to recreate the setup quickly in a disaster. Sure, you can clone the drive, but that’s more data than you need and you have to buy a drive.

My idea is this: After installing all the open source software with “make install”, how hard would it be to track down those files and bundle them into a Mac OS X package? My thinking is that one could recreate the setup by installing Mac OS X Server on a new machine and then run the super-package CD to bring it up to speed on the additional software.

Thoughts?

[Anonymous]

If you use a non-trivial amount of software compiled from source, I think this would be too much of a headache to search for all of the affected files… One common solution is to prepare a .tgz archive of all of the installed software, and include a shell script that automatically builds the software. We do this with software as well as security, so that all of your machines are locked down before going on the network

Also, in the event of a disaster, it only takes the invocation of a shell script to get your software/security configuration back to the way it was.

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