[wpkg-users] Ugly perl script to check if packages are installed on a set of workstations.

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Chris,

Chris Crow wrote:
> I was going to wait, and clean up this script, but I don't think I will 
> ever come back to it.

There is always too less time - or too many ideas...


> This script needs to be copied to the root of the wpkg share, and it 
> evaluates the following locations:
> 
> hosts/*.xml
> packages/*.xml
> profiles/*.xml
> status/*.xml (status is the directory where I copy the wpkg.xml files 
> from all of the workstations)
> 
> When you run the script, it will evaluate the list of packages that 
> should be installed with the packages that are install on each computer 
> in the status directory. It then prints the differences. If the program 
> gives no output, then everything is up to date.
> 
> I use this program to send a list to our desktop techs about which 
> computer are out of compliance.
> 
> I would love any feedback or improvements from anyone, or if you have a 
> better way to get this type of information.

Thanks a lot for your work. From the first (quick) look it seems to be 
quite a clean script which could help sysadmins.

In fact I plan to add such scripts to a kind of 3rd-party-tools folder 
within the WPKG distribution.

However I would like to have at least a short README which describes 
what it is doing and how to use it. I know this is the annoying part but 
I think just including this script is quite useless if nobody knows what 
it is doing and how to use it. You might add some basic usage comments 
to the header and a small README. For your script it might even need 
some more documentation as it implies that you have a package with 
execute="always" flag running which copies the local wpkg.xml to the 
server share. So a how-to-setup section within the README is absolutely 
mandatory.


I hope you can find some time to add these things.

br,
Rainer