On 10/5/07, Mike Gerdts <mgerdts at gmail.com> wrote: > On 10/3/07, Dave Miner <Dave.Miner at sun.com> wrote: > >> existing projects. I note that in the case of SVR4, the source has been > > open for 18 months, yet only Peter Tribble has submitted any > > contributions towards improving it (and they're much appreciated!). I > > find that quite disheartening, and am somewhat mystified as to why the > > widespread recognition that there's a need to improve things hasn't lead > > to energy being put there. > > To this day, I haven't seen anything with SVR4 packaging or pkgadd > that I find painful to deal with. Blastwave and other work that I > have done in the past has more than proven to me that a bit of > infrastructure around SVR4 packages can give user experiences similar > to those found on various Linux distros.
Absolutely. The package tools could do with a bit of loving care and attention, but aren't fundamentally broken and there's no reason why they need to be replaced by any other solution. The fundamental need for driving the packaging experience forward is the establishment of a distribution mechanism for packages. It's distribution that's the key driver, not the tools. Once you have the distribution mechanism (I've been trying to avoid the term 'network repository') in place then not only do you allow sophisticated tools to be layered on top, but people might be motivated to enhance the tools to make them work better, and would be able to do so in a manner informed by experience. Patching is another matter. That is broken. We're almost at the point now with Solaris 10 updates that patching doesn't work. The problem isn't so much pdo at this point as the patches themselves. (Maybe it's time to bring back the old Maintenance Updates?) Even if we didn't fix pdo, having the source would be useful for future work in a couple of ways: as a reference to see what assumptions had gone into it when writing a replacement, and it would help to know what bits of the package source are depended on by other bits of the install consolidation. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
