Joe Di Pol wrote: > Danek Duvall wrote: >>> 3) All subpackages (-devel, -docs, ...) will have only 1 dependency - >>> parent package. This makes a bit strange order of installing >>> packages, but I want to somehow mark package that is sub-package. >>> Cause it doesn't make sense to have sdl-devel without main sdl >>> package... >> The way we'd intended to do these was to dump everything into a single >> package, tag files appropriately, and use filters to install selectively. >> That is, >> >> file path=usr/lib/libsdl.so.1 >> file path=usr/lib/libsdl.so devel=true >> directory path=usr/include/sdl devel=true >> file path=usr/include/sdl/sdl.h devel=true >> file path=usr/man/man3/libsdl.3 docs=true >> >> etc. Locale-specific packages would be handled similarly, but there you'd >> have a "locale" tag which would specify the locale a particular file >> belonged to. > > I wonder if this is a case were technical elegance is getting in the way > of familiarity and usability. Tagging and filtering appear to have some > excellent use cases, but I'm not sure using them to functionally organize > a package is one. > > Folks are pretty familiar with the concept of a package name reflecting > what it contains, and being able to use that name to get what they want. > It's hard to see how filtering is better than "pkg install foo-docs"
Because filtering provides a consistently defined semantic rather than a series of ad-hoc conventions, and allows people to define clusters or aggregations of packages w/o worrying about the manifold ancillary packages that deliver other aspects of the package, such as man pages, localizations, etc. Indeed, we can combine SPARC, x86, etc, files in a single package. Today, we combine x86 and amd64 binaries in the same packages, and that will continue to be the case. But w/ IPS, we can filter out the amd64 bit binaries easily to target small 32bit VIA systems w/o breaking the packaging mode, updating, etc. - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance barts at cyber.eng.sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts
