Dave Miner wrote:

> Your point about boundaries is a good one.  I'll just add that I don't 
> regard the root-usr split as an inviolably sacred boundary; it was more 
> of a convenient response to accommodate small disks (relative to OS 
> size) and the diskless architecture.  Neither of those factors are 
> particularly prominent in my mind as we look at how to design the system 
> going forward.
> 
> Dave

If we're going to relax the root/user package boundary to simply 
install, can we also move any information regarding software clusters,
etc, into the packages themselves?  This would yield several benefits,
including:

1) allow checking of cluster/package dependencies at build time.
2) post-installation checking of effects of minimization

If we were to define clusters as virtual packages rather than
metadata, clusters and metaclusters could be installed via
packaging tools as well as the installer.  With the addition of
the recursive dependency code into pkgadd, it would be possible
to go from a minimal install to anoher cluster with something like

pkgadd -D -d /cdrom/.... SUNW_EndUserCluster

or somesuch....

Virtual packages would have no contents, just dependencies...
but removal of packages would then alert the user that
clusters actually depend on this package....

- Bart





-- 
Bart Smaalders                  Solaris Kernel Performance
barts at cyber.eng.sun.com              http://blogs.sun.com/barts

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