On Tue, Aug 05, 2008 at 11:48:56AM -0700, Chris Quenelle wrote:
> 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?

The publication step checks to see that the declared dependencies appear
to be complete.

I've argued that the publication service and the repository need to be
separated so that the repository can be platform- and OS-neutral.

> 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.

Maybe, but this being a publication service, and being written to large
degrees in Python, arguably it's replaceable/extendable.  Sure, a public
interface for extending it would be nice.

> An on-disk format for pkg would allow the SYSV->PKG translator
> to be unbundled.

But you still have to submit the package.

> 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.

A script built around the pkgsend command would be an ad-hoc on-disk
format.  Considering that SVR4 pkgs are typically built by scripting
around pkgmk(1) I don't see a big difference.  IPS pkgs that are not in
a repository are useless; the process of publishing a pkg in a
repository involves a protocol, not an on-disk pkg format, so that an
on-disk pkg format doesn't seem terribly useful.

IIRC the pre-inception materials said that an on-disk pkg format was
still in discussion.

Nico
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