> The thing is, it was the days where no real innovation was happening > between any of them, SGI had some of a leg over the other with graphics, > but internally, there was no point in *not* being consistent. Nowadays, > vendors like to do it to keep people from migrating. Technically the > package subsystems are more of a dependency file, a tar file holding > contents, and a description, which Slackware in the Linux world does. > It's not like it's magical, and it's annoying if you ask me to have > multiple files per package, regardless. Unless it's jds or X11 there is > no reason.
Not to get into yet another packaging discussion, but IRIX's software management subsystem is still lightyears ahead of anything available on the market, commercial or otherwise. As a former IRIX sysadmin, developer, and software packager, and a present Solaris/HP-UX developer and packager, I believe I have a pretty good oversight of strenghts and weaknesses in different software management subsystems. So, apropos "many different files", the IRIX software subsystem easily allowed for creating a .tardist, which was a single-file image with all the different software subsystems in it. inst(1M) then knew to automatically unpack it, and autmatically select any needed dependencies that were available in it. Perhaps a study of this highly advanced and sophisticated system on techpubs.sgi.com might be of benefit to you. But again, this has nothing to do with my plea (closer to imploring and begging, really) to the engineers involved in IPS to keep things consistent. _________________________________________________________________ Connect to the next generation of MSN Messenger? http://imagine-msn.com/messenger/launch80/default.aspx?locale=en-us&source=wlmailtagline -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/desktop-discuss/attachments/20080328/8b9ebeb9/attachment.html>
