I think what this document -- and much of the discussion preceding and
surrounding it -- suffers from is a lack of focus. There are a lot of
problems in this area, many of them serious and affecting a large number of
people, and the natural temptation is to plow into it all at once.
The high-level breakdown as I see it:
- Need for new packaging tools. This includes improvements to the
existing pkgadd and friends, additions like pkg-get, or some subset of
a wholesale replacement of the packaging system, including, possibly,
package file format.
- Need for software delivery infrastructure. This is mostly concerned
with where people can get bits, and what expectations they can place on
such repositories with respect to stability, support, freshness,
openness, etc. This is mostly a namespace management and policy sort
of thing, and obviously depends on the previous bullet for the delivery
implementation.
- Need for a scalable mechanism to build software. This includes the
discussion about the differences between how ON builds vs SFW/CCD vs
JDS/pkgbuild vs whatever else. The goal is to make as much software
available as possible, which means scaling out to lots of developers,
and depending on the previous naming and policy bullet to help users
choose what software is appropriate for their system.
- Need for a policy on what software should go where. This is all about
/usr/bin vs /usr/gnu vs /opt/csw, and what different directory
locations say about the software that's installed there, as well as
dealing with multiple versions and implementations of essentially the
same software. Each distribution (whether of the core OS, like Sun and
Nexenta, or of unbundled software like Blastwave or sunfreeware) will
have its own policy for this, though some commonality should be a goal.
Every proposal I've seen so far -- and all the discussion following them --
has mashed these areas together. A single proposal can (and maybe even
should) address all four areas, but I think clean lines need to be drawn
between them to help focus discussion and, ultimately, implementation. Of
course there's interaction between them, but not so much that they're not
separable.
Danek
