Kyle McDonald wrote: ... > > First one might question why WebStart runs off the CD in the beginning, > and then relies on the customer installing the correct packages to > continue running after reboot?? >
A fair question. I don't have an answer. > A better solution would have been for the Java and window system that is > 'unpacked' during the first boot up, to be left somewhere on the disk > temporarily for use after the first reboot and during the completion of > the install. It could be deleted after the install was finished. That > would have solved this problem for install purposes. > Perhaps, though it's unpacked into memory since that's done before we know what storage we can use, so we'd have copy it to disk anyway after storage was made available. There are probably other side-effects that would require dealing with, and I doubt it's worth it to us. > Instead, all installations are required to install these bits *forever* > that aren't needed. Not only that it's left to the user to select them > him or herself... if all installs need them, why not put them in SUNWCmreq? > Perhaps they should be in SUNWmreq. I will speculate that in the future, the Solaris installer and its supporting infrastructure will in fact be part of the required minimum, however we choose to express it, because it will be supplying functionality which is currently either missing (and needed) or parts of other tools (e.g. lu and friends). > From what dave said, it seems that Engineering may not have done the > work to make Java only load the X11 libs when and if the Java app needed > them. But I can't be sure from here. From what you say, it seems pssible > that they may very well have done the work for command line-only java to > work without these libraries, but because the installer tries to run > window code, they were added as dependencies anyway, totally wasting the > work that was done to not require them! ugh. > > This leads me to a new question... Is the only reason that Java 5 isn't > unselectable because Webstart will need it after the reboot? Ugh! > > Lastly, What was the rational behind rebooting after the first CD? why > not prompt and install all packages from all CD's before rebooting? > That's how the DVD works (to the best of my knowledge) isn't it? > Because on SPARC, anyway, the CD is not unmountable; we literally are booted from it. Once we modify the SPARC boot architecture it may in fact not be needed, since we'll be running from ramdisk instead; or we may get much more clever about pivoting the kernel onto a different root without requiring a reboot. Or both. Or something else. In any event, I do think we'll be able to eliminate the reboot before too long. We'll have the problem with DVD's, eventually, too - right now everything in Solaris proper fits on one, so you don't have to experience a reboot there, but I don't expect that to hold beyond Nevada. Dave
