Matthew Dillon wrote: <snip>
A Packaging system is a very important piece of any distribution. Our
goal will be to create a packaging system that, via VFS 'environments',
causes any particular package to see only the dependancies that it
depends on, and the proper version of said dependancies as well. Multiple
versions of third party apps that normally conflict with each other could
be installed simultaniously. The packaging-system-controlled VFS
environment would also hide everything a package does not depend on,
like other libraries in the system, in order to guarentee that the
dependancies listed in the packaging system are in fact what the
application depends on. There's no point in having a packaging system
that can't detect broken and incorrect dependancies or we wind up with
the same mess that we have with ports.
Wouldn't it be possible to achive the same result without the VFS with well organized lib subdirs? like "usr/lib/xyzlib1.2/" and "usr/lib/xyzlib1.3/" which would maintain the install for any given version of a lib? In other words, instead of just dumping all the libs into the one place, you simply place them into sub folders instead and then link them as needed? Granted this would cause havoc for things like LD_LIBRARY_PATH. I never did like the way we dump things in the lib dir's, its messy. The VFS idea is interesting, but it like cleaning the mess by sending parts of the big mess into another dimention, making it a trans-dimentional mess (technically a larger mess). This throws away the KISS principle.
To make this work the VFS environment would have to be able to run as a userland process. Otherwise we would never be able to throw in the type of flexibility and sophistication required to make it do what we want it to do, and the kernel interfacing would have to be quite robust. I want to make these environments so ubiquitous that they are simply taken for granted. Begin userland VFSs with the capability of overlaying the entire filesystem space, these environments would be extremely powerful.
I suspect this ability would usefull for other things too, possibly for security lock-downs on shell users env's without chrooting them as an example.
-Jon
It might be possible to build this new packaging system on top of the existing ports infrastructure. It will be several months (possibly 6-12 months) before the kernelland is sufficienctly progressed to be able to imlpement the userland VFS concept so we have a lot of time to think about how to do it.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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