Hi all, I recently screwed up while doing an upgrade of a sparc system via onu, by using the x86 packages instead of the sparc packages. No real harm done since a rollback to the original BE was easy. However, this seems like a limitation in onu, pkg, or both. I discussed this a bit on #pkg5 on irc.freenode.net and the consensus was to move the discussion to this alias.
So, on my sparc system fore example, it removed all of the files in platform/sun4u/kernel/drv/sparcv9 except for "sf" and "us" and thus I couldn't boot. What I expected to happen was that I would get a bunch of x86 bits installed on my machine but the sparc bits would have been left alone; some files stored in common locations may get overwritten, but I would think that we could probably still boot. Even better would have been if onu or pkg would have flagged this issue and let me know that I'm trying to install x86 only packages on a sparc system. >From chatting on #pkg5, I learned that for the final released packages, we merge the x86 and sparc packages into a single package and thus should not run into this problem. It seems to me that building x86 packages should have an x86 flag in them and same for sparc, and when the packages get merged, then either remove the flags, leave both flags, ... to indicate that both architectures are actually represented here. It seems like there are many possible ways and areas where this could be solved, and I'd like to see a discussion about it happen with the experts on this alias :) I'd like to file a bug/rfe, but not sure where to file it or who to file it against :) This is by no means a critical issue, but it would be nice to have a plan for where this is going. Thanks, Mike
