Philip Brown wrote:
> Shawn Walker wrote:
>>> (Of course, once you realize that the crux of the problem is actually making
>>> the software packages themselves widely available on the network, you
>>> realize that what's really required is not to completely reinvent the 
>>> packaging
>>> wheel, but to integrate something like pkg-get properly into the existing
>>> system. Not only would it guarantee compatibility with and enable reuse of
>>> all the existing investment by vendors and users in the existing packaging
>>> system, it would also allow all the benefits to be ported back to the 
>>> production
>>> releases of Solaris that Sun are going to have to support for a few years 
>>> yet.)
>> Something like pkg-get is insufficient to address needs without serious 
>> rework (zones, etc.). 
> 
> It's not THAT big of a change. You can just use the same mechanisms that IPS 
> plans to use.
> pkg-get calls pkgadd.
> pkgadd has already been reworked to be a LITTLE more zone friendly, with 
> sol10.
> It could be reworked further, to use the exact same zone-friendly mechanisms 
> planned for IPS.
> (running pre/postinstall scripts through SMF, rather than raw, etc, etc)
> That's not that much more work, compared to writing and debugging a whole 
> new packaging system.

That doesn't help the problem that Sun faces that ISVs or other 
repositories like Blastwave or sunfreeware.com don't face:  patching and 
the fact that the current patchadd/pkgadd are mostly unaware of each other.

Sometimes it is good to start from a clean slate.  I remember hearing a 
hole bunch of similar arguments against ZFS compared to UFS+SVM or 
VxFS+VxVM inside Sun when ZFS was around the same phase of development 
as IPS is now.  Now look where ZFS is now!

-- 
Darren J Moffat
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