On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:23 PM, Shawn Walker <swalker at opensolaris.org> wrote: > On 02/25/10 01:15 PM, Clay Baenziger wrote: >> >> Hi Evan, >> One thing which a customer made a strong case for to me at Community >> One, was support for splatting a tarball on a system (as it's a common >> format for a heterogeneous OS shop). It seems it'd be useful to have an >> automated way to do what's suggested in bug 9777 - Need way to publish a >> tarball. This may be out of scope but it seems something which folks >> would have used a post-install script for and might be easy and useful >> to provide. > > A better option than a tarball would be to use the pkg tools to dynamically > create a pkg(5) package and install that. ?That has the added benefit of > being able to verify the contents of the install including the "splatted" > contents.
That's a terrible option. If installing an IPS package was a reasonable solution to the problem, it would be done that way to start with. The applications thus installed may have their own builtin management and update mechanisms, which native packaging would conflict with; they may be designed to be modified after install; they may be highly dynamic (such as a mysql database); they may be fully integrated into an existing application and configuration management system; they may contain highly system and context specific files. Not all applications (especially in-house or legacy ones) can even be managed sanely by packages. The problem isn't just tarballs, although that's often the easiest way to bootstrap a system -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
