On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 05:23:51PM -0600, Shawn Walker wrote: > On 01/12/10 06:27 PM, John Beck wrote: > >jmcp and I were working on the gate machine, pulling our hair out trying > >to figure out why pkg(1) was behaving differently for us. Eventually truss > >gave me a hint that led me to $PWD, which in my case on that machine is > >/net/MYWSNAME/export/home/jbeck . Well, guess what? /net/MYWSNAME/var > >is shared, and /net/MYWSNAME/var/pkg exists, so pkg just decided that it > >should use the data stored in the publisher directory thereunder, instead > >of /var/pkg/publisher on the machine to which I was actually ssh'd into. > > > >Now, no offense to this team that has done fantastic and innovative work, > >but this strikes me as a huge throbbing bug, as it violates the principle > >of least surprise. Why would I expect my image to be anything other than > >whatever is in /var/pkg on the machine on which I am operating? Now, if > >I was to supply some argument to tell pkg to look elsewhere, that would > >be fine, but to do so by default strikes reminds me of a story. When I > >was coding zonecfg(1m), I initially wrote a certain interface in a way > >that was easy for me to code, but not as usable as it could have been. > >Dan asked why, and I explained, then he observed that I would have to > >write the code once, but our users would have to execute it thousands > >of times. Feeling silly, I went and rewrote it, and learned a valuable > >lesson, one that I think could be applied here: my perception is that > >the needs of the many (end-users) should outweigh the needs of the few > >(pkg developers), and the behavior should be changed to conform to the > >principle of least surprise. > > Are there any objections to changing this behaviour as John indicated? > > If not, I'll be filing a bug to change this behaviour for post-release.
As long as the client still respects PKG_IMAGE in the environment, then I have no objection. -j _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
