Bart Smaalders wrote:
> 
> Just a few things that are broken w/ SVr4 packages:
> 
>       1) there is no upgrade


Would be useful. Yet, this could be solved by sun providing actions(?) for 
this sort of thing. Or just defining some standards.

blastwave has solved this issue, by defining internal packaging standards to 
preserve package state across upgrades.

Works quite well.







>       2) scripting interfaces for package creators are toxic

They are ugly, yes. But eliminating scripting, is not a good "solution" for 
this.


>       3) versioning is undefined

That's like saying, that X11 is broken, because it doesnt tightly define 
[insert GUI system feature here].
versioning is left open. If sun/whoever, wants to set a versioning standard, 
then SVr4 packaging does not get in the way of that at all.


>          9) patching is not addressed at all


That could actually be an advantange. more below, on patching..


>       5) redelivery of a package is required even if one file changes

That's what patching is for. Done RIGHT, that is. Sun does patching... 
poorly. But that's a procedural problem within Sun, imo.
Even with IPS, sun is going to have to do the equivalent of "patching", even 
if you put up smoke and mirrors to call it by another name.
It's still going to suck, if sun doesnt change their back end approach to 
it, rather than just changing the technology front end.

Changing gears a little;
In my opinion, the whole approach to patching+SVR4 should be changed, to 
make "a patch" be a mechanism to update
SUNWfoo VERSION 1.2.3_FCS10rev1

to

SUNWfoo VERSION 1.2.3_FCS10rev4


Conceptually, I think that's what IPS kind of plans on doing.
The thing is, you dont have to throw out SVR4 packaging to handle that concept.


 >      4) metatdata (.clustertoc, pkghistory) is stored elsewhere
>       6) networking support is laughable
>       7) no dependency following

easily doable at a higher level. cf: blastwave.org

FYI, people have modded pkg-get, to also handle.. *drumroll...* patching.

I just havent had enough time to really evaluate and integrate that code myself.


>       8) Contents file a huge performance problem

eh... sun was all ready to fix that "problem" with sol10 FCS. Too bad they 
botched it. But apparently, that problem wasnt enough to throw out SVR4 
packaging altogether then, so why should it be now?
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