Kyle McDonald wrote: > Should SUNWxwkey be in some Xwindows cluster? it (like SUNWxwpl) is left > to be installed by itself.
That's another one of those packages that looks like X but comes from another team. It's only useful on a very small number of machines (SPARC machines with PS/2 keyboards, not USB or SPARC keyboards - which is mainly the SPARC laptops and systems built out of the SPARCengine motherboards, but not any SPARC workstation or server Sun has ever sold that I know of), so is installed only on those machines by a dynamic cluster test or as part of the All+OEM metacluster. > Can you explain this: > > Why do packages in SUNWCxwrte require many but not all the libs from > SUNWCfontlibs, and SUNWxwrte doesn't include them? SUNWCfontlibs was made separate because the libraries are useful in some environments without X. (Okay, SUNWxwxft isn't useful without X, but the rest are - I don't remember why Xft got bundled in there instead of SUNWCxwrte.) There's not much in SUNWCxwrte yet that actually requires those, but the dependencies are expected to increase over time. > Shouldn't requesting an Xwindows Run-time environment actually install > a working runtime environment? Yes, but that's what package dependencies are for. I don't believe clusters are supposed to be all-inclusive, and I thought were mainly a way to easily group packages in the install GUI package list and jumpstart configurations, not in any way a reflection of dependencies. There's a lot of things you need for a working X runtime that aren't in SUNWCxwrte - such as the kernel, libc, various kernel drivers, etc. >>> 5. I'm sure this isn't simple, but why does >>> installing SUNWj5rt (which is required now by so many >>> things.) force me to install parts of X11, CDE, >>> ToolTalk, Motif? Even on a headless server? Shouldn't >>> I only need these other packages if I need to use >>> Java graphically? >>> >> >> Because Java doesn't package it's graphical toolkit classes >> separately from the rest of the JVM to allow splitting out those >> dependencies. In Nevada we've at least split SUNWxwplt >> so Java only pulls in the X libraries, and doesn't require the >> X server packages. (For details on that split, see: >> http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6424854 ). >> >> > I agree that splitting the package would allow the dependency to be > specified at the a finer grain. > But I suspect that the java binaries dlopen the X libraries, instead of > being linked to them. right? Not as far as I'm aware - I don't know the Java internals, but I know ldd shows libX11 is linked into Java binaries like /usr/java/jre/lib/sparc/xawt/libmawt.so. > Is there any concept of an 'optional dependency' where it could be noted > that the base functionality of the package will work with out the other > package, but that functionality would be enahanced if it was added? It would be nice to have a more sophisticated dependency system, perhaps like the one used for SMF services? -- -Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
