Darren J Moffat wrote: > Vasiliy wrote: >> I talk to Bart and he raise serious consern about installation in >> $HOME or any shared area (he asked me to post it here). Home >> directories srared over network and can be accessible from any >> architecture and any Solaris Version. So instalation of software in >> shared area need special attention and special procedure to make it >> multiplatform. > > No arguments about the existence of the issue. However that is for the > created or the software and the packages to fix. > > For example Firefox assumes a single architecture/platform and allows > you to place binaries for the plugins in your home directory. This is > completely independent of where and how the firefox binaries themselves > are stored. > > There is a workaround available set and environment variable to say > where the plugins are. BTW this predates even Mozilla as a project if I > remember correctly. > > I've seen other software that writes out binary files and has basic > endianness issues. > > None of these can be solved by the packaging software. > >> I think that Shared Software is another big project. > > In my opinion it isn't a project at all it is just about good design of > the software in the first place. SunOS has long encouraged the > separation of binaries from sharable this is what things like /usr/share > are all about. > > I don't see how the packaging tools can actually help with this at all. >
I think adding features to support user-level software install without making sure the appropriate engineering and documentation has been done to support using it correctly is not a good idea. In particular, our failure to correctly describe how to build shared libraries led to all sorts of LD_LIBRARY_PATH hacks which still plague us... Note that users of user-level configs will have to use either $ORIGIN or per-application ld.config files in order to find their shared libraries; they'll need per-architecture libraries and $ARCH directives as well. Add to this info on 64 bit libraries and HWCAP support and there's a lot more to this project that just enhancing pkgadd. - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance barts at cyber.eng.sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts
