Robert Milkowski <mi...@task.gda.pl> wrote: > I must admit that I actually like IPS. Of course it is work-in-progress > but for most of the part it already works better than the old packaging > tools.
IPS is not yet inside OpenSolaris and I am talking about distros from the community here. I see no useful migration path from the SVr4 packaging to IPS. There are however a lot (thousands) of SVr4 packages created by the community. >From my assessment, the most important task for a community distro is to get rid of the Closed source stuff. Once this is done (and I am planning to work on this task based on build 130), we may discuss packaging. We then may discuss pros and cons and decide on the best solution. I am not interested to change things just in order to change things. One of the reasons for UNIX to be successful is that things have been defined simple and that old programs are enhanced without breaking them. Doing this was one of the major strengths of Sun in the mid 1980. > Some people think that improving on the old packaging is easy, etc. > Well, but none of them have actually tried. There is pkg-get from > Blastwave but despite it being in the market for so long it is already > waaay behind IPS in terms of end-user experience. See above. Until about 1997, there was improvement in many programs. New ideas in UNIX have been made at Sun and promoted to the POSIX standard. The last prominent example is the basic idea for the new extended tar archive format, see: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/pax.html This idea is from Sun from 1997 and the test implementation (available with the -E option in Sun) is from Sun also. When in summer 2001 it has become obvious that there will be no related changed until the final aproval for POSIX.1-2001 in december 2001, star became the first tar implementation to support the official POSIX version of the format. 9 Years have passed, Sun tar still does not support the POSIX version of the format that was drafted by Sun. Even worse, while the POSIX.1-2001 tar format defines methods that allow infinite extensions that are cleanly tagged to a vendor and thus cannot confuse other tar's with similar extensions, Sun still continues to add extensions to their TAR format based on the way POSIX.1-1988 defined extensions. This allows for 25 extensions without vendor tag. > With performance improvements, reduction in memory utilization and > on-disk format IPS will even much better - and all of it is coming. Are you sure where the bottleneck for the SVr4 package system is? Are you sure that the bottleneck is packaging at all? A typical Solaris SXCE installation takes 45 minutes (disregarding the time to fill out the forms). With a better ISO-9660 implementation and with a "star" based install, the whole installation should speed up to aprox. 10 minutes. Even today, the bottleneck is the ISO-9660 implementation and not the packaging system. So why to change the packaging if the bottleneck is elsewhere? Jörg -- EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin j...@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
