Brian Gupta writes:
> I don't think you have convinced me it's not possible. You have convinced
> that to do this we would have to be a lot more careful about internal
> interface changes, which might be an overhead that we simply can not afford
> at this time.

I think it greatly stretches the bounds of "possible," and that it
also (very unfortunately) shifts the cost onto someone else.
Everybody contributing to OpenSolaris (and Solaris itself) will need
to work out those transition strategies on _all_ inter-module
interfaces, even undocumented ones, even Project Private ones.

The cost is also essentially unbounded.  How far back to do you
support upgrade?  Can I go from S9 (and all of its private libraries)
to S11 via this mechanism?  If not, and it's just a "going forward"
proposal, then how about S11 to S12 or S13?

It sounds like we'd potentially be keeping around API compatibility on
private bits for a decade or more.

> I am not looking so much for snazzy, I am thinking that easy is a valid
> goal. (As in no-brainer easy).

Using a separate disk slice is no-brainer easy.

> If not package installs on a running system,
> another way it might work is to leverage free space on the existing root
> filesystem, or possibly make a temporary miniboot upgrade image in the swap
> volume. (Assuming there is room).

See Caiman and ZFS-based upgrades.  That's exactly what they're doing.

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive         71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
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