Hi, I agree that we'll have to revisit the package naming and granularity of desktop components, but it's not a top priority right now. The reason we chose to bundle components together under generic package names is the volatile nature of desktop components. For example SUNWgnome-wm changed from librep + sawmill to librep + sawfish to metacity over the years. Having a stable package name made upgrades more manageable.
It's not yet clear to me how easy it is to obsolete or rename packages with pkg(5) Laca On Sat, 2008-05-17 at 14:22 +0100, Lewis Thompson wrote: > 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 _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
