Thanks for the reply, C.K.,

Obviously, for someone who is explicitly looking for "a cross-platform 
solution", then SVR4+ anything, probably isnt a good fit :-)

For some of the other things you wrote about, though:...



Christopher Kampmeier wrote:
> 
>> Are you actually telling me that IPS "solves" this? If so, i would be 
>> interested to see a reference on this.
> 
> Sure, user images fill the bill quite nicely:
> 
> pkg image-create -U -a sun.com=http://updates.sfbay.sun.com:10000  c:\sdk


Interesting to know. Thanks.
As a comparison, it seems about equivalent ugliness to
"pkgadd -R /sdk ..."

Or if you want multi-package, network-updatable support

PKGADDFLAGS="-R /sdk"   pkg-get  install ....


As mentioned previously, if the arbitrary "quit if not root" limit was 
removed from pkgadd, it would address those "user area packages" needs 
fairly easily.




> Since the -R option isn't explicitly positioned as a means to establish 
> and maintain non-OS images, we started our experiments with some healthy 
> skepticism. ..... 
> Specifically, the lack of an INST_RELEASE file caused patchadd to fail. 
>  ...
> Were there other issues 
> lurking beyond this example?  Who knows, but I wouldn't be surprised if 
> we had hit more.


Intersting that you are specifically interested in the "patching" part of 
things as well, as an ISV, even in "user package areas". Good to know.

As far as your concern about potentially "hitting more problems"...
there would not seem to be any more of them.

Cant find the source to patchadd on opensolaris.org, so instead,
I did an empirical quick-n-dirty test of this, by doing the following:

- mkdir /scratch/root
- [copy /etc/release to /scratch/root/etc/release, because SUNWsamfsr 
specifically requires that file, not because it is usually required]
- pkgadd -R /scratch/root SUNWsamfsr      (4.6.5,REV=5.10.2007.03.12)
- [allowed some postinstall stuff to fail, since not relevant to this test]

- copied in  /var/sadm/system/admin/INST_RELEASE to /scratch/root

- ran patchadd -R $ROOT 126508-03


It worked.

===============================================================
Verifying sufficient filesystem capacity (dry run method)...
Installing patch packages...

Patch 126508-03 has been successfully installed.

# showrev -R /scratch/root -p
Patch: 126508-03 Obsoletes:  Requires:  Incompatibles:  Packages: SUNWsamfsr

===============================================================


Presumably, choosing a "cleaner" package than SUNWsamfsr, would result in 
cleaner process, such as eliminating the copy of /etc/release, and so forth.

So, to restate the point here:
With the 2 TRIVIAL code changes of
   1. eliminating the "root user" check from pkgadd
   2. eliminating the INST_RELEASE check from patchadd

... SVR4 packaging tools could function quite well, for user-space installs 
of packages, even down to the level of allowing patching.


_______________________________________________
pkg-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss

Reply via email to