On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 8:56 AM, Philip Robar <philip.ro...@gmail.com>wrote:
> I've noticed that there seems to be a fair amount of dislike for IPS which > leaves me puzzled. On paper IPS sounds great and I know that some serious > thought, engineering and math went into the design of IPS. I also know that > despite the claims of SVR4 packaging fans that SVR4 packages have their own > limitations--especially when it comes to patching systems. (Fortunately my > own scars from my days of packaging software for Solaris faded long ago and > only dim memories of those days remain. :-) > > I'm particularly curious as I know one of the engineers who worked on > IPS and he's one of the smartest people I've ever met. > > Are the objections to IPS centered on its design or implementation, or > both? Are the SVR4 fans blind to its limitations and/or ignoring difficult > problems that can't be ignored in a business/enterprise environment? If > there are any objective and reasoned writing or discussion on the subject > I'd appreciate a pointer. > Objections to IPS cover the whole spectrum - political, technical, and social. The way that IPS was introduced into OpenSolaris was plainly unacceptable. Political machinations and secrecy abounded, and community involvement was denied. The breakdown of trust and sheer insult to the community would have made IPS a hard sell, even if it had been technically sound. >From the technical point of view, IPS is pretty weak. It's not too bad (although still far too slow) for an end user. Implementation in python limits minimization possibilities, and artificially ties an instance of python to the OS. It inherits the fundamental flaw of implementing zones via packaging, rather than keeping packaging independent of zones. It insists on defining policy, rather than implementing the policies defined by an administrator. It still has meaningless package names, random package boundaries, and incorrect dependencies. By embedding so much system knowledge into packaging (zones, the way drivers work, services, etc) it is a huge barrier to innovation and development in those areas. Being network-only limits its use in many scenarios. It's also proved in practice to be far too fragile - many of us have ended up with a hosed system that IPS refused point bank to let us do anything with because of its constraints. There's also the social aspect, which in many ways concerns me the most. To encourage adoption, you want to build the broadest possible ecosystem. And that means getting others to build and distribute software for your platform. The IPS repository model is a huge barrier to entry, and many will simply refuse point-blank to be involved. By contrast, simple file-based packages are easy to build and trivially easy to distribute by any channel. As a developer and software builder, I want to concentrate my energy on building new software and facilities, rather than fighting with packaging. The failure of IPS here is to understand that packaging itself is irrelevant; it's the packages and their contents that matter. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
