I was the preinception review for IPS, and I jotted down some notes and questions. Here they are in no particular order... :-)
There was a recent problem where the GUI wouldn't do the BE-creation step. How did the architecture permit the GUI to skip the be-create step, but the cmd line did it? Does the GUI use the same API as the command line? Was the smarts for creating BEs put into the wrong place? Can a non-root user query the server? Can non-root update the local catalog? Do some query operations go directly to the server? Can a non-root user usefully use the query operations? I can't easily figure this out because the refresh operation doesn't tell you when it actually does an update. It seems to be overly silent. Why should the package system have any dependency smarts at all? It needs to support meta-data, and enforce dependencies at install time. But why have it discover dependencies? Should the discovery of dependencies be a completely unbundled step? IE there needs to be a well-defined interface so that users can enhance or replace the dependency discovery/checking phase. Such users might not be python programmers, eg. Is there an explicit operation to pull-to-cache? Or to list the contents of the cache? Or to clear the cache? How does pkg know which packages require the creation of an alternate BE? How does it know which packages to install there? And which should go straight to the main BE? Not all packages are part of the OS, remember. An on-disk format for pkg would allow the SYSV->PKG translator to be unbundled. Not having an on-disk format is very mind-blowing for the average developer. If you want people to use this technology, you have to provide some guidelines for what the normaly daily development process is supposed to be like. And also what the release engineering process could be like. For example: How does my nightly build produce packages? How do I hand off the bits to RE, how does RE stage them to an internal testing server? etc, etc. Many of these people won't be admins and won't have the ability or desire to create and maintain their own servers. _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
