Keith M. Wesolowski wrote:
The Companion has a few advantages over Blastwave. One of the most important is that we do not duplicate software which is already in current builds of Solaris (put another way, it's in another OpenSolaris consolidation). This comes at a price - we don't support older releases. Neither Blastwave nor Sunfreeware has solved this problem, and it's quite a serious one, especially where libraries are concerned.
Perhaps what's needed is what Fink does on MacOS X. There are a few pseudo-packages such as X11 that can be satisfied by more than one real package, such as "system-x11" (Apple's version) or "X.org" (from fink).
If there are multiple choices when installing the higher level package that depends on this then you get asked "which of the following options do you want to use for this dependency?".
Certainly this may imply more testing, but is nicer for a user who (for example) wants to use an extension along with the built-in Apache, rather than installing a duplicate copy.
James touched on this issue in one of his earlier messages. One of the things we'd like to do with the Companion is find a really good way to gracefully retire components once they're integrated into another consolidation, while still providing the necessary functionality to users of older OS releases.
Fink kind of did this for X11, for example, via the scheme above when Apple integrated X11...
Certainly I'm also a user of Blastwave, although like Bart's recent comment, it would be nice if there could be less replacement of internal packages.
Hugh. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
