some comments below. note that i'm not a member of the IPS team, a packaging expert, etc. but i did buy the currently available fluendo codecs so i'm replying because i'm an interested customer. ;) ed
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 03:16:04AM -0500, Brian Cameron wrote: > > I am currently working with some engineers at Fluendo to help them > provide their media plugins for OpenSolaris and also to help make > the codeina program work on both Solaris and OpenSolaris. I have > a few questions I am hoping you can help with. > > The codeina client program sets 4 variables to identify what system > its running on. These are: OS, ARCH, DISTRO and DISTRO_VERSION. > These don't need to all be set to unqiue values for each Solaris > or OpenSolaris release, but instead only need to identify if Fluendo > needs to ship different packages for a given system. So, in other > words, DISTRO_VERSION probably only needs to be incremented if the > packaging system or binary compatibly changes between versions. > > We were thinking it would make sense to set OS to Python's > os.uname() value. It returns 'SunOS' as system name and 'i86pc' or > 'sun4u' for Intel and Sparc architectures. This seems to be the > same on both Solaris and OpenSolaris. So we were thinking of using > these for the OS and ARCH values. Is this reasonable for both Solaris > and OpenSolaris moving forwards, or should we be using some other > more recommended interface? > well, when distinguishing between sparc and x86, it might be better to use whatever the python equilivant for "uname -p" is, which should return "i386" or "sparc". the problem with using "i86pc" vs "sun4u" (which is "uname -m") is what about sun4v? (also, what about any other future platforms sparc and x86 platforms that have a different "uname -m" identifier.) > We could set DISTRO="generic" and DISTRO_VERSION to "any", which are > codeina's default values if it isn't necessary to differentiate. > However, since Solaris and OpenSolaris have different packaging systems > I think we might need to set DISTRO to "solaris" or "opensolaris". > > Is this correct? Or is it possible and advisable for Fluendo to just > provide a single set of Solaris packages and install them in both > Solaris and OpenSolaris? I know Fluendo would prefer this if possible, > and avoid having to provide their code in different packaging system > formats. > IPS does have backwards compatibility for SRV4 packages, so they could just release SRV4 packages for both solaris and opensolaris. that said, it would be much nicer if they had an IPS repo. i purchased their codecs, so currently i get an email when there is an update to them, then i go to their website, download them, and install the update. if they had an IPS repo i could subscribe to it and just run the pkg(1) command to download and install any new updates. of course since the codecs are not free, this would assume some kind of subscription/login authentication between my client and their IPS repo, which afaik is a feature not yet available in IPS, but it is in the works. once it's available i'd strongly recommend this approach. in the meantime i'm surviving with the SRV4 compatibility. ;) > Assuming that isn't possible, and they need to provide different > styles of packages for Solaris versus OpenSolaris, then what is the > recommended interface to use to identify whether the codeina client is > running on Solaris versus OpenSolaris? > i'm not sure this distinction needs to be made. afaik, for all the subsystems that fluendo should be dependant on, both solaris and opensolaris will be delivering the same binaries in the same locations. so they should be able to compile one set of binaries for use on both platforms. the only difference would be in the packaging. > Any advise would be appreciated. It would be good to get the > Fluendo codeina server/client set up properly now and avoid problems > in the future. Then users will be able to download useful media > and popular codecs from the Fluendo webstore via codeina easily. > > Note that Fluendo hopes to have MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoder codecs > available for sale for Solaris by the end of the year. So that's > exciting news. > woot! :) ed _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
