Peter Tribble wrote:
On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 07:35, David J. Orman wrote:
Stable software, reasonably up to date, and a
*part* of Solaris.
The trouble is that stability and up-to-dateness are conflicting goals.
Solaris chooses stability. Now personally, I think they go too far,
with a reluctance to update things because they *might* break things
(rather than checking to see if they actually do, or even offering
users the choice, but stability is one of the reasons current users
are using Solaris inm the first place so shouldn't casually be thrown
away) but the alternative of simply slapping on the latest version
and ignoring all the breakage that results is also unsustainable.
Potentially what would help here is to integrate a stub pkg-get command
into the base install, but out of the box this would just be a wrapper,
not linked to any specific back-end repository.
Then, the first time you used it (via GUI or command line) you would get
a question/dialog asking you to choose one of the back-end sources [*]
along with a "Help me choose" button for people who have not heard of
the choices. The page displayed by "help me choose" would then say
something like:
* Companion CD - stable, but often not the latest version.
* Blastwave - generally up to date; 1,511 packages; not from
Sun; tends to install a ton of it's own dependencies.
* sunfreeware.org - <insert description>
* etc......
Once configured, the top level pkg-get would pass the command onto a
real command under /usr/sfw/libexec/pkgget/blastwave/..." or whatever,
in the same way that mount calls /usr/lib/fs/ufs/mount or some other
backend.
And if necessary also with a stub command called apt-get that just says
"please use pkg-get" and exits, for those from Linux who don't know the
command is pkg-get.
While blastwave does it, I can't use blastwave as a part of some
other solution. And that's the problem with all the package
management systems - they're fine, as long as you use them in
complete isolation.
Exactly. Say I want PHP to run with the bundled Apache. Blastwave
won't do this, unlike Fink, for example.
Hugh.
[*] in fact the ability to configure a path of sources might be
preferred. For example: "sun.com if the package exists, otherwise
Blastwave".
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