Danek Duvall writes: > We see this as a problem that exists entirely outside IPS. As Stephen and > David said a few weeks ago: forget IPS -- imagine that our DVD just got > infinitely big and we wanted to fill that space with all the SVr4 packages > we could. How do you solve *that* problem?
You've hit the nail squarely on the head. It isn't about IPS or about magical repositories. It's inherent architectural issues with a mixed environment. > Is that solvable without presuming IPS? I haven't seen anyone really try, > at least not out loud, in public. As in Stephen's response to your > original message on this thread, it's not clear that we've even nailed down > the architecture of the solution, never mind implementation details like > switching to a new packaging system. "It's only software," right? :-> In order to solve the problem, though, we've got some deep issues to work on. There are *MANY* places where there are "famous" name spaces, and where we have either illusory support or just no support at all for having multiple extant versions of any one object. It's not enough that we merely solve the multiple-installed-package-version problems and the path issues. We also have to choose between figuring out what it means for these other bits (how does ld.so.1 know which bits are in scope and how do we avoid toxic library clashes?) or simply outlawing the practice in some extreme cases (there's only one port 25, no matter how many sendmail / smail / postfix variants you may want to install). I suspect that having a lot tied up in the details means that any complex high-level plan (implicitly layered like John's, or more composite) is going to have high risk. There are likely places where we end up saying "no" because the web gets too tangled. I certainly do want to see that special repository-based plan, because so many project teams seem to be claiming to be dependent on it, but I'm not convinced it'll be magic. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
