Matthew Dillon wrote: > Well, this is somewhat amusing because we are now all the way > back to my original 'wish list' for a packaging system... that is, > to install packages in self-contained directories, use varsyms > in global directories (like /usr/local/blah) to control visibility, > and to be able to partition off installation sets under the control > of the user so there is no possibility that they can interfere > with each other. > > e.g. lets say I am running a big whopping server with terrabytes of disk > and terraflops of cpu. Even better, consider the situation we have when > we eventually reach our generic clustering goal.... clearly in such > situations we do not want to have 10 critical subsystems sharing > a single copy of, say, libjpeg. > > > As I said, in such setups you probably don't even want them to run in the same address space. If you got goobs of memory and CPU, the security aspect is well worth the few percent performance hit of running it inside Xen or something similar and once we get hardware virtualization in commodity X86 chip it will be even more important to be able to do it.
It's not strictly a package manager task, but since there are many great visions around for DFLY (most stemming from you ;), it would be a shame to build a system that can barely be managed because of lacking package manager. And no existing one even comes close. It's a mess to manage single systems with those and it will be an orders of magnitude bigger mess to manage SSI clusters with them.
