I really don't get why you think OpenSolaris (esp. as in Solaris Express,
as opposed to regular Solaris (currently 10)) should have any particular
gee-whiz-updates-are-painless tools. Solaris Express is _not_ really
meant for production (or for anybody's technophobe grandmother, either),
it's very early access; especially SXCR. If you're using Solaris Express, you're
essentially a beta tester (or perhaps a developer trying to have your stuff
ready to take full advantage of Solaris 11 when it finally is released), which
means you're voluntarily accepting extra pain to be close to the bleeding edge.
Now, since Solaris tries to be fairly stable even during what used to be
internal (and is now public) development, SXCR is usually quite usable,
and once installed (and aside from updates), has a lot of goodies that
Solaris 10 doesn't; so there are certainly people already familiar with
Solaris that use it in production or at home. But I don't know that SX is
actually meant to convert large numbers of Linux apps developers to
Solaris lovers, so I don't see why you seem to be measuring its success by
some ability to be painless to that crowd. Indeed, if I were trying to
take some existing {Linux, BSD} app that I supported to Solaris, I'd target
not SX, but the oldest Solaris distro in widespread use (not unlike what
Blastwave does); although as time permitted, I'd also try to do new
development and packaging for SX, taking advantage where possible
(and where they were stable enough) of dependencies it already satisfied,
and additional features it might have, so that when Solaris 11 comes out,
I'd have my app ready to go. As such, I would try to treat my SXCR installation
as throwaway (with all my files elsewhere), and just do a fresh install each
time. Call me paranoid, but my experience is that a fresh install is sometimes
faster than an upgrade since it doesn't have to worry about comparing
what's there with what's installed, and often likely to be cleaner since
an upgrade is really much more complicated than a fresh install, and therefore
has a lot more that might go wrong (or at least go somewhere unexpected).
Nevertheless, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and if you spent
the time learning how (and listening more than talking), you'd probably
find that it needn't be all that difficult.
And a new installer is under development, which will eventually ease at least
some upgrade methods (ISTR not all might be supported right away).
As for non-vendor package repositories, Blastwave's pkg-get can surely
be configured to point to a private repository too, in which case one
could use it for easy installation of a list of one's own packages and their
dependencies.
So, while I'm sure there are things that could be learned from how
Linux distro X, Y or Z does things, I think that any relevancy that might
have is for the long run, not for whether you're a happy camper right now.
This message posted from opensolaris.org
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
