On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 7:39 PM, James Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Kristian Rink writes: >> Mauro Mozzarelli schrieb: >> > Please, could you expand on your statement? Why would it be a bad >> > idea? To me, it would solve most of the problems we have today with >> > OpenSolaris on having to create redundant sub-installations of most >> > of the operating system dependencies, only to install a package like, >> > for example, "mplayer" from blastwave. >> >> How? > > It wouldn't have any effect on that problem. > > The blastwave problem is that the repository (in general; there are > exceptions) aims to be self-contained and to run on Solaris 8 and > higher. That means that many packages declare a wealth of > dependencies, and those dependencies are to other blastwave packages > that carry the libraries needed. > > In order to fix this "problem," someone would have to figure out a way > to make a blastwave package that depends optionally on either a > system-installed copy of the "foobar" library or, if that's not > available, a blastwave variant of "foobar." Then you'd have to make > sure that it links to the right one at run time, and you'd have to > make sure all of the versioning lines up -- meaning that the blastwave > copy of "foobar" would likely be constrained to versions that happen > to be compatible with the system-supplied ones. > > No matter _what_ packaging mechanism is used, that's a tall order. I > certainly don't blame anyone for not tackling it. I suspect it might > not be fixable in any real sense at all.
It appears to be fixable. RPM does have features that make this possible via the Provides clause. A package like say SUNWgnome-base-libs can mention: I provide libpango-version, libgtk-version, libglib-version and so on. Another package needing those libs can say: I require libpango, version >= <version>, libglib, version >= <version> and so on. The package system evaluates these dynamically and figures out appropriate dependencies without having to explicitly bind to package names from specific repositories. I find this feature extremely powerful and generic. This does not mean that I am suggesting RPM for OpenSolaris. However this is something that Pkg should have looked at IMHO. I did mention this time and again in various contexts. Regards, Moinak. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
