Hello,
I'm an Ubuntu/OpenSolaris user and I want to share my concerns over
the way we are currently delivering packages on OpenSolaris 2008.05.
afaik, none of the points I'm making are limitations of pkg/IPS,
merely that the way that we currently use it to deliver packages
reflects what we always did with Solaris
If we look at the SUNWgnome-media-player package (SUNWgnome-media is
another and I'm sure there are more) we can see that two key
applications are shipped: rhythmbox and totem, along with helper
plugins for firefox and a number of plugins for each application:
usr/bin/rhythmbox
usr/bin/totem
usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libtotem-basic-plugin.so
usr/lib/rhythmbox/plugins/*
usr/lib/totem/plugins/*
This methodology works just fine for Solaris, with its *very* slow
(major) release cycles, but OpenSolaris is a totally different beast
where 'meta' packaging won't work. This is because the development of
rhythmbox and totem are separate
If we look at the way this is handled in Ubuntu (and most other Linux
distros) we'll find something along the lines of three packages:
rhythmbox, totem and firefox-totem_plugin (and we could argue that we
should have rhythmbox-plugins and totem-plugins)
The benefits to these more fine grained packages are obvious: we can
upgrade totem and rhythmbox independently of each other (and we make
it easy for third-parties to release updated packages)
The drawbacks... I'm hard pushed to think of any
Thanks,
Lewis
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