On Fri, 16 May 2008, Danek Duvall wrote:

> It's not.  It stands for Upgradable, Frozen, Incorporated, and eXcluded.
> Only the first is used so far.

Ah, ok. I figured out the upgradable, I won't trouble you about the rest
until they are actually implemented :).

> > However, after installing the update, nothing seemed to have changed.
>
> Does it still consider itself upgradable?

No, that did indeed change, but nothing tangible seems to have happened
other than the "entire" package has a slightly newer version number and no
longer lists an upgrade available. It's just not clear what that upgrade
was intended for or accomplished.

>     pkg contents -o action.name,action.key entire
>
> which will show a bunch of depend actions and the FMRIs

Indeed, that is considerably more informative.

> rudimentary version of the same).  An incorporation is a package that
> contains dependencies which constrain the forward (upgrade) movement of
> other packages through their version space.

So, hypothetically, if you have the 05/08 "entire" incorporation installed,
when 11/08 openSolaris packages show up in the repository, they won't show
up in the potential upgrade list? And you would need to explicitly install
the new 11/08 "entire" incorporation to upgrade to them? So rather than
hundreds of potential packages showing up in the upgrade list, you will
just see the one possible upgrade to "entire", and if you don't install it
only minor updates to the existing 05/08 packages would be available.

I think I understand it.

> The dependencies are optional -- that is, installing the incorporation
> doesn't install the packages mentioned in the dependencies.

So in a future openSolaris installer, the "entire" package would be
installed to define the revision level of the release, as well as whichever
specific clusters or packages you picked?

> > The packages "slim_cd" and "slim_install" seem to be the same.
>
> These are actually more like metaclusters -- the dependencies are not
> optional, and so all the packages they reference are brought in.

"slim_install" does seem to only contain dependencies, but "slim_cd" has no
dependencies listed, just a handful of files:

ACTION.NAME ACTION.KEY
file        etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf
file        etc/pam.conf
file        etc/passwd
file        etc/shadow
file        etc/user_attr
legacy      SUNWfixes
set         fmri
set         authority

It looks like it is more relevant to the live CD distribution than the
operating system once it has been installed? I'm guessing the etc/passwd
and etc/shadow files included in the package define the "jack" user.

> pkg info (or pkg info -r, if you don't have them installed) should tell
> you that.  Their descriptions are lacking, sadly.

Yes, "Summary: entire incorporation" wasn't particularly enlightening :).

> You should be able to pkg install and pkg uninstall any packages you
> choose.  That slim_install is installed won't actually prevent you from
> uninstalling the things it depends on.  That's a bug in the general
> sense, but it's also a bug that slim_install isn't an incorporation.

So from an abstract point of view, even though the dependencies are not
enforced, it seems it would be better to remove the slim_install package if
you're going to move any of the packages depended by it.

Thanks for the explanation, I'm sorry for the torrent of questions I've
been posting this week. I'm trying to wrap my head around this and see if
it will be workable for our production ZFS file server we're going to
deploy soon.


-- 
Paul B. Henson  |  (909) 979-6361  |  http://www.csupomona.edu/~henson/
Operating Systems and Network Analyst  |  henson at csupomona.edu
California State Polytechnic University  |  Pomona CA 91768

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