[wpkg-users] how do you handle 'conditional/optional/installation dependency' installs

[Urs Rau]

OK, just when I thought I had the hang of things wit wpkg, I came up
with a new question. Thanks for this great tool.

I an ideal world we admins would like to be 100% in charge of what
programs are, or are not as the case may be, installed on the
workstations we are responsible for.

However in some environments there will always be a few workstations
that have more privileges than we would like, or even think is
appropriate. But putting the politics aside.

How would I get wpkg to check for a condition (might be a registry key -
or could be a file or even a version of a program) and only if a certain
condition exists (or not) actually install the latest version of said
program?

Something like check for the presence of the adobe reader and if it
already exists, make sure we have the latest version, but if it isn't
there in the first place, do not install or add it.

Or the same thing (and slightly more realistic) if zonealarm firewall is
installed then make sure it is the latest version. But if the machine
doesn't already have it don't install it.

The way I have seen wpkg work sofar, is I can use wpkg read a 'profile'
and to then check for conditions for a package that is supposed to be
part of that proifile and if certain minimum versions of programs or
libraries or files or registry entries aren't fulfilled, wpkg will
trigger an upgrade to the latest. But unless I have made a mistake
somewhere it appears as if wpkg will faithfully do the checks, and if
they confirm a condition, will then proceed to installing. In some
environments the profile information will on occasions not be complete
and 100% perfect and it would be nice if wpkg could somehow be told two
or three 'anomalies' and if any of those are found, then proceed to
install a certain, latest, version for those programs, without adding it
to every single machine in that 'profile'. I guess I would call this new
feature either an 'optional' flag or a 'installation dependency',
depending on how you look at this.

Am I the only one that would find this functionality usefull? Have I
missed something, and can it already be done with the features wpkg
already has?

Thanks for any pointers or help in achieving this.

Happy wpkg-ing.

-- 
Urs Rau







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