Venky wrote:
On Tue, Jun 09, 2009 at 03:38:46PM -0700, Bart Smaalders wrote:
Nicolas Williams wrote:
IPS could have it's own SMF-like actuator concept. It'd be replicating
much of the same functionality that's already in SMF. I think that'd be
cleaner, actually, but it'd also require lots more work.
This would imply that anyone adding new stuff to be merged
would have to add code to the packaging system, and the packaging system
would have be upgraded often.
Not necessarily. It should be possible to have a plugin
architecture for actions and have actions delivered as packages.
For example, pkgA needs to modify /etc/inet/services file and so
includes a dependency on pkg:/action/servi...@1 which provides the
services-file-modification action plugin.
This will allow actions to be versioned independently of the
packaging system. Sure, it does also mean that the code becomes
more complex and the plugin API interface would need to be
reasonably stable.
Our experience indicates that developers creating packages should not be
modifying the internal actions of the packaging system, any more than
application developers should be shipping pluggable kernel system calls
with their creations to add new features to the kernel.
Actions being part of the packaging system seems ugly, and ties each
version of the packaging system code to one particular operating
system. Having them delivered as plugins seems much cleaner to me.
The actions we have at present are those necessary to lay down files,
links, dir, etc, licenses, and describe package metadata. It has been
our plan to only add actions if they're necessary to get packages
laid down on the disk and make the system bootable. This set changes
slowly over time, which would not be the case if we entertained the
idea of adding actions everytime a software developer wanted to modify
a configuration file.
The action API may in the future become more closely specified but
this is not an externally extensible interface, and we have no plan
for it to become so.
Ports to other OSs may well require new actions, but that's readily
handled already if you examine the way actions are assembled today.
- Bart
--
Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance
[email protected] http://blogs.sun.com/barts
"You will contribute more with mercurial than with thunderbird."
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