On Wed 05 Aug 2009 at 05:28AM, Roland Mainz wrote: > These items leads to an old idea: > What about allowing one file entry in IPS database to be represented by > multiple different "mutations" of a file, e.g. one and the same source > file is "mutated" into different formats depending on platform > attributes.
This is a called 'variants' and is already implemented in IPS; variants are how we distinguish arch-specific contents, as well as zone-specific contents. http://markmail.org/message/y75llik7rugv7l5u Variant support was checked-in by Bart in January, and has been in use since OpenSolaris build 106 (IIRC). A package manifest must declare which variants it knows about: set name=variant.opensolaris.zone value=global value=nonglobal set name=variant.arch value=sparc value=i386 Then it can tag actions with variants: dir ... opensolaris.zone=global ... path=dev/zcons variant.opensolaris.zone=global file ... path=etc/security/device_policy ... variant.arch=i386 variant.opensolaris.zone=global file ... path=etc/security/device_policy ... variant.arch=sparc variant.opensolaris.zone=global (in this case there are two device_policy entries because the contents vary between the two architectures). If the file name changes (like in example 1 (which is unavoidable > since the FreeType2 code mainly looks at the file name and not file > signatures)) other files (in the fonts case the "fonts.dir" files) need > to be changed, too (which creates dependicy trees or even graphs) ... > > ... comments/rants/ideas/etc. welcome... Since variants are image level properties, as long as you publish consistently, it should be fine; as an aside, all actions can be variant-ed, including dependencies. Ed recently checked in "pkg change-variant" which allows the pkg(1) client to switch the variant of an image, adjusting all of the actions as needed. Two expected applications of this are: 1) Physical-to-Virtual conversion of systems into non-global zones 2) Switching a system back and forth between non-debug and debug variants of binaries. I don't know what the LiveCD team would think of your proposal, but variants would seem to fit this use case at least from a technological perspective. -dp -- Daniel Price, Solaris Kernel Engineering http://blogs.sun.com/dp _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
