James C. McPherson wrote:
On 12/02/10 09:59 AM, Brock Pytlik wrote:
....
I think it's an open question of how user/partial images should
interact. Imagine a setup like jurassic only each user has their own
user image/partial image set up in their home directory. Perhaps it's
reasonable to tell each user to be sure to set their $PKG_IMAGE
correctly.
Perhaps the right sequence of checks is:
1) Am I sitting in a user/partial image above
Perhaps this should be is user's homedir a user/partial image?
Brock
/
2) Is / a full image
3) Is there a full image higher than / that I'm sitting in
Hang on a sec - why would a user have an image or partial
image setup in their homedir? Why should that be the first
check that you make?
Perhaps I'm just very wrong about how this might be deployed on a system
with many users.
Surely we should be assuming that anybody running "pkg image-update"
is not wanting to update a system, and instead wants to update
a home directory?
My understanding was that the idea behind user or partial images was to
allow users to install packages into an area they control, without
needing the privs needed to install the package into / or a location
where all users would see it.
Now, that's just my interpretation or synthesis of the conversations
I've been part of over the past year or so. It's possible that I'm way off.
But if I'm correct, then I'd suggest that optimizing for the average
user, and not the sysadmin of a large multiuser system is the right
choice. In that case, I think what I outlined above probably makes a
sense. Most desktop/laptop users won't bother to set up a user image
since they're admin for the entire box. So, check 1 would fail and 2
would succeed, meaning their operations by default would happen on the
system image. That's what we desire I think.
With a large system with many users, the admin could set each user up
with their own user image. That means that a user could install emacs
(for example) without needing the sysadmin to do it for them. The
downside would be that the admin would need to remember to set their
PKG_IMAGE or cd to / when they wanted to modify the system image.
Does that clarify things at all?
Brock
James
--
Senior Kernel Software Engineer, Solaris
Sun Microsystems
http://blogs.sun.com/jmcp http://www.jmcp.homeunix.com/blog
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