Peter Tribble wrote: > 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?) >
My contention, and I think others who've spent a lot of time looking at it would agree, is that the present architecture is fundamentally flawed. Building patches as a layer on top of packages, and then having a packaging system which is unaware of that layer above it, is untenable; we've managed to prove that pretty well by experiment on y'all over the last 15 years. So I don't see how you can separate the two and say that "packaging is fine" and "patching is broken". They've had an equal hand in creating the mess that exists. Dave
