I'm not 100% certain if this fits into Portage, but it is certainly related. On Redhat, if you administer a lot of machines, it is possible to use RHN and push updates to your machines. As an example, this was incredibly useful for me to be able to upgrade the plethora of hetrogenous servers we have running redhat with minimal interaction after security errata were announced. In that case I can just select all my servers on the RHN, and tell the application to push the upgrade information down, and then each server installs it for me. The one thing I don't like about the RHN method is that is centralized on Redhat, so if somebody cracks that, they could really hurt your box. So instead, how about we have a local secure server application, lets call it the "GN master", that the admin can connect to. He also configures all of his servers to check in with the master at specific intervals. He would be able to log into the application on the master, and select updates that would go to each of his machines, and when the servers next contact the master, they would see an instruction to upgrade a package. The master could also speicifly flag GLSAs easily for the admin to see (RHN puts them at the very top of the list), or possibly install them automatically if there is no breakage caused by them. The additional side of it, is that this system on RHN can also be used to do new installs of software on machines. I don't think that belongs in the gentoo system myself, but it is a logical extension of the above functionality, and other people may ask for it as well. The primary use for this would be sysadmins with a LOT of servers to take care of. My boss and I are presently considering migrating our server room from Redhat+FreeBSD (~200 machines) to Gentoo, and this would make life much easier for management. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
so what exactly would be needed for this from the portage side ?
high-level api for using emerge (beyond just calling it from a shell). all emerge operations should be available. eg being able to do the equiv of 'emerge -upv world' and get a data structure containing the information to pass back to a network client running on the machine (which can pass it back to the admin).
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 10149 ***
