Good points from everybody. Adding a few tidbits of my own. Just to clarify I'm no SVR4 lover having had worked on the messy codebase during my stint at SUN. It had good ideas but the age of the code was showing.
1) In essence packaging and package distribution is a solved problem. The big question of why re-write a new thing when several excellent open source alternatives existed was never answered. No analysis was provided. Nexenta demonstrated the technical feasibility using the Apt toolchain successfully though there were licensing issues. There are other more friendly upstreams with better licensing as well. 2) Assumptions were made, design decisions taken without involving people who had experience with distributions. Mistakes were made silent U-turns taken and so on. 3) I was shown the door when I started asking questions: http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/pkg-discuss/2008-September/006509.html http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/pkg-discuss/2008-September/thread.html (Search for subject "Observations on IPS") If that was how community was dealt with imagine how it was dealt with inside the company. In fact I got the guts to ask questions only after leaving SUN. 4) As many have pointed out, no scripting is desirable but does not require re-inventing a new package management solution from scratch. The action mechanism IMHO was poorly thought out requiring SMF services to handle some postinstall mechanisms (like Gnome related stuff). Using the system's service manager to handle package requirements is so broken. 5) The implementation grew and grew in complexity. There was ample scope creep. Which package manager in the world had to develop it's own custom HTTP server? 6) Cross-platform support was provided including support for Windows for managing the Java app installation on Windows. Isn't this another scope creep for a Unix packaging solution? 7) Performance was bad especially if one is remote from the Pkg server. For example Installing a 1MB package from machine in Bangalore from a Pkg server in California used to take long. Especially if one is trying to install after a gap of say a month. It would spin in plan creation for minutes. Downloading an ISO image of the OpenSolaris livecd from the same location showed better bandwidth utilization! 8) I'll make a controversial comment here. Which technology organization takes some of it's smartest core OS engineers and puts them on a multi-year project to develop a new all-encompassing multi-platform package management solution? With a practical approach and with people having experience in these matters it probably takes 6 months to a year to roll out something that solves the problems and is stable. As a side note I had worked out a full-featured package manager for SVR4 in about 3 months of part-time effort. This was for BeleniX. Not that I liked to remain on SVR4 but I had little option at that time. See: https://moinakg.wordpress.com/2008/11/22/the-belenix-package-manager/ Point #9 "Recursive Uninstall" was actually discussed by the pkg-discuss folks after I made that post. Regards, Moinak. -- P.S.: Running for cover. I might have stirred an old hornet's nest. ================================ http://moinakg.wordpress.com/ http://moinakg.github.com/pcompress/ ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
