I think several OpenSolaris 2008.05 early adopters have encountered the
same issue with OpenSolaris 2008.05 and pkg's insistence on installing
the latest and greatest of everything:
- They're happily working away with OpenSolaris 2008.05 installed from
CD with a few extra packages pkg installed as needed.
- They've almost finished working on something and they notice that
they need to install some package (openoffice,sunstudio...)
- The package system insists on installing the latest version (I think
this was a design constraint in pkg)
- The dependency tree works back to over 1G of package upgrades required
- The user does a pkg image-update but this breaks grub and causes some
other issues unrelated to the one tiny package I'd planned to install.
So what the user wants:
A single package. (The same package he would have gotten if he did a
"pkg install {whatever}" the day before the servers were upgraded... in
my case, sunstudio)
What the user needs:
A single package and all of its dependencies.
What the user gets:
An upgrade of the single package and more than 1Gigabyte of unrelated
upgrades.
Wouldn' t it be nice to have the option to pkg install from a snapshot
of the package server taken just before the package server was upgraded
to Nevada build 90 packages?
I understand why this isn't in the early pilots but I think it will need
something like this before OpenOffice is used in production.
Traditional Sun/Solaris users do value stability. (Maybe any support
would be voided or become more expensive unless pkg image-install is up
to date.)
In my own experience the fact that Linux lacks long-term ABI/API
stability and Windows/OSX purposely forces planned obsolescence means
there is a huge hole in the market for stability. I've actually seen a
case where a minor font appearance change after an upgrade was almost a
showstopper for a customer.
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