On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 08:45:57AM -0600, Tom Mueller (pkg-discuss) wrote:
> Nicolas Williams wrote:
> >b) User images can run, either concurrently or at different times, on
> > systems running different OS versions.
> >
> > Clearly the same is not true of system images.
>
> We've been assuming thus far that a user image only runs on one OS/ISA
> type although this is not enforced. If you wanted to have an application
> installed for multiple platforms in your user directory, you would need
> multiple user images, one for each platform type.
I mentioned this. It probably won't work. Consider a hypothetical,
say, an app like Wireshark:
Say there's a new version of the app that can take advantage of
features of a a version of libpcap that's in OpenSolaris 2009.06,
but not 2008.11, and say this is a build-time matter. So the app
can't run on 2008.11 unless built to run on 2008.11.
We could build two pkgs then, one for 2008.11 and one for 2009.06.
So far so good.
As a user I'd then create two user images, one for each release of
OpenSolaris (three if you add in 2008.05, more if you add S10/S10
updates to the matrix).
And I'd install each version of the app into each corresponding user
image. My home directory, incidentally, is on a file server.
So far so good.
Now, I log in on a 2008.11 desktop, and also on a 2009.06 desktop.
Will the menu entry for this app point to the correct instance in
each desktop? Or will one or both point to the wrong one?
After all, there's only one set of $HOME/.gconf26 and one
$HOME/.gnome2 directories...
I suspect the answer would not be what users would want. But I don't
know enough about GNOME to really know without trying it.
Also, even if the answer is what users would want, there's still the
issue of having N user images, one for each supported OS release still
deployed in the user's environment. With twice-yearly releases N could
get very large.
Surely users don't want to be in the business of managing more than one
user image.
Perhaps IPS could do that under the covers -- you tell it what OS
versions you need support for and IPS could do its best to ensure that
all apps you want are installed in each user image as necessary. But
that too sounds very complicated.
I've no solutions here. I suspect that user images need more thought.
Nico
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