Just adding my $.02, since I'm actually the one doing most of the transport work. Shawn has made most of the relevant points already, but I'm going to expound upon a few.
> > The correct approach would be to eliminate the repository/depot and > > just make packages be files that are put someplace. Whether that be a > > web server, ftp server, nfs server, CD, usb stick, or local disk is > > immaterial. I think you're confusing the correct approach with the approach you find simplest to comprehend. I haven't read any articulate objection that indicates we made an incorrect choice when favoring network install. > Packages are just essentially files that are put somewhere right now. > It's just that the all the individual files of the package are put > somewhere instead of a single file. Once package dependencies and > grouping has been redone properly, users will benefit from reduced > bandwidth usage and I/O. Users already derive some benefit. When we perform an upgrade, you only download the files that have changed. Other packaging formats require that you download an entire package with all of the files, changed or not. > It is certainly our intent to eventually enable these sorts of > installation sources. However, our focus is currently on the network > aspects as far as I know. We will have these installation sources, they're a degenerate case of the network installation. Once we re-write the transport layer to use HTTP 1.1 and pipelining, we'll have all the pieces that we need. The libraries that we will use, instead of Python's underwhelming urllib, have support for HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FILE, and on and on. > > The current mechanism is a huge barrier to entry. Not only does it > > make it much harder for other sites to distribute your software, it > > makes it enormously hard for end developers who wish to distribute > > software for OpenSolaris. If, and this will be the common case, they > > aren't able to run their own repository then they can't create or > > distribute OpenSolaris packages at all, which harms the whole > > ecosystem. We aren't stopping anyone from running their own repository. > > This is why the on-disk package file format is the crucial piece of > > the puzzle, because that should be the form in which the software > > moves around. > > I don't know why you insist that can be the only form that software > moves around in -- it's certainly a valid form, but not the only form in > my view. I agree with Shawn. There's no reason why we need to insist upon only one way in which the bits get moved around. > To quote j: > "The download format is going to be changed as part of other transport > work. Our intent is to move away from tarfiles, and instead have > clients perform pipelined HTTP GETs." And once we get to that point, we should be able to remove what little logic remains in the depot for downloading files. The goal is to have the download front end be interchangable. You could use Apache, CherryPY, your HTTPd of choice, or even FTP or file. -j _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
