Karen Tung wrote: > The Package Manager is available on the Live CD desktop. You can click > to start it > from the desktop. I don't think it is too useful to have it there, and > perhaps having > it there will confuse people, because of the following reasons: > > 1) While running from the Live CD, you can't delete any packages since > all the > data in /var/pkg is read-only. However, the "delete" operation from > Package Manager > is not disabled in the Live CD env. So, you can still click on delete, > and it will try, and > it won't even get to failing to delete the package, it will fail on "out > of space" which > I will discuss in item 2. > > 2) When adding or deleting any package, the search index will be built, > since the > Distro Constructor deliberately don't build the search index while the > image is created. > The search index is huge, it will not fit in the limited amount of space > allocated for the root archive. So, we will always run out of space. > I looked through the Package Manager, and I don't see an option to not > build the index. > > 3) Though adding packages work in the Live CD env, only a very small set of > packages that don't write to any of the read-only areas can be added, > and people > should take care to add them using the pkg command with the --no-index > option. > > So, since adding/deleting packages using the Package Manager will always > fail. > Why include it in the desktop? >
I think I would direct the effort towards filing bugs to get Package Manager to be aware of its environment and behave appropriately. We do have legitimate cases of installing packages in the live CD environment, and would certainly like users to be able to at least search and browse the package repositories from that environment in order to be able to ascertain that OpenSolaris has the software they want and get to know the Package Manager a bit. Dave
