On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 11:03 PM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Sriram Narayanan <sriramnrn at gmail.com> > wrote: >> Hello list: >> >> I'm posting the various thoughts that we've had over the past year or >> so with respect to a change in packaging. Some of these are points >> that have come up in discussions. >> >> We need a new package format because: >> - There are several serious issues (as per Moinak) that were pointed >> out about SVR4 in the ARC case for IPS. > > But what are those flaws? At least some of those in the ARC case > were false; others could be fixed. > > Not that I think SVR4 is interesting for Belenix. The primary reason > for using it would be compatibility, both with other distros and with the > installed base, and as Sun have chosen to go their own way there's > nothing to be compatible with, and Belenix hasn't got a 20-year old > installed base to worry about. ?But it would be interesting to know what > you see as the key functional weaknesses in SVR4 from a Belenix > perspective.
The specification is great, implementation is horrendous. Making sense of the SVR4 source code is painful and is a maintenance headache. The scripting implementation leaves too much to the packager - etc. The class-action scripts should not have been scripts, but special actions similar to IPS with no possibility of the user's ability to overload them. SVR4 cannnot handle filenames with spaces. SVR4 does not handle upgrades properly. > >> - There are widely known and accepted package formats from other >> distros and communities (RPM, Deb, etc) which we could leverage. >> - Formats that we could consider are RPM and Deb. >> >> RPM >> RPM seems the most interesting format at the moment because: >> - popular and widely known package format >> - lots of tools (yum, smart, etc) which are RPM aware >> - active maintenance, development and feature additions. > > And spec files are currently widely used to build both Belenix > and OpenSolaris packages (eg. jucr). > Exactly - practical reasons. >> Deb >> - We may explore this too >> - Nexenta have done good work here > > That, for me, would be the reason for looking at deb - compatibility > with the Nexenta packages. > >> - Debian Community's opposition in the past is a matter of concern. >> ? ? ? - Need clarity on their position. >> ? ? ? - Need to make time and interact with the Debian community >> >> IPS >> We do not want to go with IPS because: >> - No point in reinventing the wheel >> >> Other formats and package managers >> - ebuilds, pacman > > Given that we (as in the OpenSolaris community taken as a whole) > are likely to live in a world where multiple packaging systems are > used, how is that confusion resolved? Do we simply say that each > distro maintains its own packages? Is converting between formats > simple? Is the software itself expected to be compatible with multiple > distros? What is the story for ISVs who might be interested in > producing software for one or more OpenSolaris distros? > Excellent points to ponder. For our purposes it should be possible to provide a Dpkg alien type mechanism to import binary packages. However there will is a limit to cross-distro binary compatibility. BeleniX builds stuff out of the same sources and similar build recipes as OpenSolaris: SFW, JDS, FOX, ON, G11N, DevPro, Caiman etc. So as far as base OS and core platform tools are concerned they are fully compatible. However we differ from Osol in the additional FOSS tree builds in terms of versions, builds recipes, patches choice of compiler etc. In fact we are slowly converting from SFW makefiles to equivalent spec files. The monolithic SFW makefile system is horrible. In addition many specs are constantly being ported over from SFE repo. In addition BeleniX tries to stick to the Osol filesystem hierarchy as much as possible. While we build with Gcc4 mostly apart from ON, Studio is used for some core stuff like NSS/NSPR, Medialib, libm etc. All these have ensured that base compatibility is maintained. Just as an example the binary JDK 1.6 release for OpenSolaris works fine on BeleniX. > My own instinct says that, taken in isolation, the best answer for > Belenix would be rpm; my worry would be the divergence that would > inevitably create. True - we are still discussing. Regards, Moinak. -- ================================ http://www.belenix.org/ http://moinakg.wordpress.com/
