On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 17:05, Vasiliy wrote: > I think there are two issues two different thing we discussing here. > > 1. Non root installation > 2. Multiple instances of software installation > > Second one is much more complicated and recuire some kind of isolation > mechanism between different installation which may have concurrent, > incompatible software installed. Providing isolatin in this case brings > complexety of implementation on my opinion to the same level zones > implementation has, and zones was introduced exately for this reason - > have different installation of different software on the same machine > (as Sarah mentioned). Also it is already resolved in zones and > packaging and patching are supported on zones.
I don't think that multiple instances have to be anything like that complicated. Simply installing in different directories ought to be enough. > I think we should try to address this issue using zones somehow. I don't think that zones are an answer here. They provide process isolation, not file isolation. And often I would want access to different versions of the same software. For example, wanting access to every last N versions of the compiler might be required for a software developer. A web developer might want multiple versions of all the popular web browsers. I would just want to say 'use Studio11' and the system would. (In fact, at my last job, that's exactly what I would type.) The packaging system currently doesn't aid me in supporting multiple packages very well. That's OK, because normally I just unpack a tarball and it's often got the version number embedded in the name of the resultant directory. The biggest problem in this area has historically been the Sun Compilers where the installer can relocate the software but keeps a single copy of the packaging data in the main repository. How would user-based install handle multiple versions? In particular, what if you wanted an identical copy of something centrally installed already? What if you wanted an incompatible version? -- -Peter Tribble L.I.S., University of Hertfordshire - http://www.herts.ac.uk/ http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
