On Sat, Jun 06, 2009 at 02:05:29AM -0700, UNIX admin wrote: > > Not necessarily. A registry, for example, would > > allow us to solve that > > problem. > > Does such a solution exist as of now?
Technically, yes. Roughly: the ARC is the registrar and the product itself is the registry database. But you can see that that's not flexible enough to enable third-party delivery into /usr. In order to allow that we'd need a bonafide namespace registry database, and we'd need registration rules tailored for a world in which third parties can deliver into /usr. > Is it documented anywhere how to interface with it? Effectively, yes (see above, and filesystem(5)). > Is it easy and convenient to use? Yes, it is, though in its current incarnation it doesn't support third-party regitrations (see above). More seriously... Implementing a registry wouldn't be difficult, from a technical point of view (one of the myriad web front-ends to an open source DB would do, perhaps with a bit of DJango thrown in to make the UI prettier). The crucial issues would be all political: a) community consensus for such a thing, b) funding to implement such a thing, and, finally, c) finding or creating, and funding, a body suitable to act as a registrar. I doubt Shawn's alone in wanting third-party software delivered into /usr. It makes a lot of sense to me, for example. Why should users have to manage their PATH at all? To me the missing component is namespace management. I'm open too to the possibility that 3rd party software delivery into /usr is bad for other reasons I've not considered. For one, even a registry couldn't prevent political conflicts over the namespace. IIRC we've already seen conflicts between unrelated FOSS projects being fought over in OpenSolaris discuss lists (psarc-ext and opensolaris-arc). But a popular namespace registry could actually help prevent such conflicts in the future, particularly if other distros were to use it. Nico -- _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
