On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 02:46:25PM -0800, Bart Smaalders wrote: > Yet another reason why we need a new packaging system.
I'm not sure that's really the case. I happen to be fond of our pkg system and I've written many an updateable package (where you update by pkgadd w/o a prior pkgrm). SUNW packages, however, aren't -- you have to pkgrm + pkgadd. The support for updateable packages could be improved to where it's easy to use, and our packages could be retrofitted to support this. A lot of work, that, but a new packaging system won't be any less work. FWIW, the main problem with pkg updating is that by default it's off and by default pkgadd'ing a pkg that is already installed results in a new "instance" of the pkg, but for most pkgs multiple instances are not meaningful. Yes, you can set MAXINST=1 in pkginfo, but we generally don't. And yes you can change the default pkgadd behaviour to "instance=overwrite" (see admin(4)). But that's not enough: some/many pkg scripts will need to know when a pkgadd is being added vs. updated. But all this is for another list... Nico --
