Danek Duvall wrote: > On Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 11:39:11PM +0200, Roland Mainz wrote: > > AFAIK one item is missing: > > - The packaging system should work with diskless and/or networked > > clients, e.g. clients which get all filesystems (even the root > > filesystem) via NFS or AFS/DFS (this feature is very important for > > universities or large custers). > > I believe that's one of the things Stephen meant with > > 2. Virtualized systems. As long or longer, we've supported the notion of > diskless systems, where the installed image is shared out, in portions, > between multiple running environments. Zones was a direct evolutionary > successor of the diskless environments, and shows that this approach > can lead to some very economical deployment models. Lower-level > virtualization methods can also benefit from the administrative > precision that comes out of sharing known portions of the installation > image. > > in "Old" inputs.
Erm... but my comment was not only about "virtualised" systems - it's more a "generic" reminder to keep the packaging system filesystem-neutral that it works even on NFS or AFS/DFS without problems. I know that ZFS is "hip and cool" - but that doesn't mean it will be best solution in all cases or in solve the issues we may have in twenty years (as an off-topic example: Each time the i18n people come up with the comment that everyone should use Unicode I remeber that twenty years ago the i18n experts thought that ISO2022 is "hip and cool" and everyone should use it exclusively. Every decade has it's own cool stuff but IMO APIs should be designed at a generic level (for example take a look at the POSIX widechar API which covers ISO2022, Unicode, GB18030, Tron etc. - it works with all encodings and locales from almost two decades and will likely continue to support even newer stuff in the following decade. A good counter-example is X11's switch from COMPOUND_TEXT (which was encoding/locale "neutral" and _extensible_) to UTF8 strings (which is Unicode-specific and causes serious headaches for cases like the Han-unification and other areas)) and IMO the same should apply to the packaging stuff in Solaris). ---- Bye, Roland -- __ . . __ (o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org \__\/\/__/ MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer /O /==\ O\ TEL +49 641 7950090 (;O/ \/ \O;)
