On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 8:55 PM, Erwann Chenede <Erwann.Chenede at sun.com> wrote: > Hi All, > > As described by Laca in April [1] upgrading GNOME packages with IPS is > problematic as various caches need to be updated. > > Currently it is handled by postinstall scripts. As this functionality isn't > (intentionally) provided by IPS. The creation of SMF services to update these > caches is needed.
Looking at consequences like this make you realize just why you need some level of "scripting" integrated into packaging :-( Why 6 services? The number of services is exploding, leading to performance and manageability issues. Is there an intrinsic reason why these have to be separate rather than just a single 'update-caches' service? Why is the gdm login dependent on these services? Will gdm itself fail? Or will a gnome session just be degraded. If the latter, then for one you don't need to lock users of kde, wmaker, or twm, or whatever, out just because a bit of gnome failed; for another I would much rather have the system do its best and let me log in to fix it rather than just sulk. In the same vein, what does failure of one of these services really mean? So something went wrong, somewhere. What went wrong? Does it actually stop anything working? If something does go wrong, should more effort be expended on trying to work out why? If a service fails, how does the user know how to fix it? If one of these services is rerun after and then fails, going into maintenance, will it kill the graphical login? How does an administrator know that it isn't safe to disable these services? (Particularly if they're running a system that doesn't have a graphical login, so they wouldn't get alerted by the gdm dependency, but potentially all gnome applications might be broken.) Looking at the scripts: Why find -print? Is -print necessary? Why find -follow? This just seems wrong to me, as why would you not know where the files really are anyway, and you run the risk of following a misplaced symlink into a black hole. And you're not consistent with whether -follow is used or not. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
