On 12/20/06, Bart Smaalders <bart.smaalders at sun.com> wrote: > > > If we're going to relax the root/user package boundary to simply > install, can we also move any information regarding software clusters, > etc, into the packages themselves? This would yield several benefits, > including: > > 1) allow checking of cluster/package dependencies at build time. > 2) post-installation checking of effects of minimization > > If we were to define clusters as virtual packages rather than > metadata, clusters and metaclusters could be installed via > packaging tools as well as the installer. With the addition of > the recursive dependency code into pkgadd, it would be possible > to go from a minimal install to anoher cluster with something like > > pkgadd -D -d /cdrom/.... SUNW_EndUserCluster > > or somesuch.... > > Virtual packages would have no contents, just dependencies... > but removal of packages would then alert the user that > clusters actually depend on this package.... >
I think you want clusters as separate and distinct objects. And for clusters to be managed as clusters by the install/package system. To differentiate clusters (which may not be the same as what the .clustertoc defines as clusters) from virtual packages, and expand on some of the functionality I would like to see: A cluster has contents (packages and other clusters) and dependencies. For example, a gnome cluster might contain the gnome base cluster, a gnome tools cluster. a gnome games cluster, etc., and depend on the X11 cluster. Removing a cluster would remove all the contenst that weren't in other clusters, but *not* the dependencies. (How would virtual packages provide a means to remove whole classes of software?) You could install a cluster and exclude some parts. For example, I might want gnome but not the games. So partial installation of groups of packages is necessary. (I don't see how a top-level virtual package can do this, but it's something I regard as essential.) Clusters can have overlapping contents. So a package (and cluster) could be in more than one cluster. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/install-discuss/attachments/20070105/4af184aa/attachment.html>
