Ben Rockwood a ?crit : > IPS is a new packaging system and is designed with the future, not the > past, in mind. The way to handle secure environments will be to mirror > an IPS repository, trim it to suit your environment, and install > privately from that. Alternatively, if you were hyper secure you might > use the Distribution Constructor to create custom install ISOs. Both > these solutions are a major improvement from systems of the past.
Sure, it's possible. Seeing this as an "improvement" is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. It does add a lot of unnecessary overhead over the existing process, which is to put files on a CD, and install them. Not everybody administering systems has desire to learn new processes :-) > The only major impediment to IPS's success is its newness.... having to > learn a new packaging system, especially one so radically different as > IPS, isn't something most sysadmins want to waste, errr, i mean spend, > time on. But, once you do the advantages become clear. Agreed. Just, some people will never do, and that has to be taken into account. > The packaging system has never been a user choice, really. If you want > to run Sun's OpenSolaris distro we'll have to adopt IPS. Same was true > for RPM or SysV. I don't know. Solaris has been pretty much successful, and yet, I don't remember using SysV packaging that much. Beyond Sun, there's Blastwave/OpenCSW. But in the world of commercial software? How many commercial Solaris applications use SysV right now? I can't remember installing any. In my experience, most of the time, commercial software use some kind of tarball/script combination that work the same across their range of supported OS's. > Put another way, the essence of any distribution is the packaging system > and therefore if people reject IPS they'll reject OpenSolaris (meaning > Indiana) and have to instead choose a distro like Nexenta, in the same > way that if you wanted to run Linux but disliked RPM you choose Debian > or Slackware or Gentoo or whatever. I think you're a bit extreme here :-) Packaging is just a way to provide applications. Most people care more about what's inside the box that how it looks from outside. I've installed RHEL many times, not because I love RPM, but because IDL was supported on it, not on Debian, and users needed it. And IDL doesn't even come in an RPM package... Hmmmm, I probably look too negative here, but still, I just want to make my point. IPS may be great someday, but it won't be what makes OpenSolaris.com successful (same as the crappy MS Windows packaging system probably isn't what made it successful). And even if it's actually great, it shouldn't be forgotten that it has to deal with human beings that don't really care for sheer greatness, but JustWorkingness with a minimum of fuss. Having the option to deploy repositories *is* great! Still keeping the possibility to work in the same old traditional way is needed, thus ensuring a smooth transition between sysadmin generations. That it is coming next year is good news, and I'm sure people who have to define the features for Solaris Next have this in mind. Laurent
