>Well more generally services need to upgrade their configuration and SMF >has placed developers between a rock and a hard place: on one hand we >forbid reading the repository on a dead root, but on the other the >proper upgrade hooks offered by the packaging system (preinstall & >postinstall) are pre-reboot.
And has caused all services to spring their own "at first boot finish installation" stuff: postrun, fc-cache, etc. This screams "hole in architecture, must fix" to me. >Timing. I think the upgrade method should be executed when the start >method would ordinarily be executed, so that all of the dependencies are >ready. Which begs the question of whether any developer would want his >upgrade method to be executed sooner than when his service would start. >I think the only reason to do that would be if the configuration were >being consumed by other entities which could start earlier. I think in >those cases the other entities should depend on the configuration owner >anyway. The whole "manifest import" thing has issues with upgrades also; other services are potentially started before manifests are imported which declare dependencies. >I also wonder if we should be more general in deciding when the upgrade >method needs to be run. Shouldn't it be executed if the user upgrades >by manually pkgrm'ing and pkgadd'ing? I think we should require service >developers to deliver a version number with their service and record it >in the repository. Then we can execute the upgrade method whenever the >version number changes. If we exposed the version number to the service >developer, this would also make it much easier to tell what needs to be >changed, since he could easily determine exactly which older version of >the configuration is present. Or we could just execute the upgrade >method every time the service starts, and let it decide whether anything >needs to be done. There's another secondary issue: currently, when a Solaris developer removes a service, the onus is on them to clean up all vestiges in the repository. Somehow, this feels wrong. Casper
