On 18/05/07, Rich Friedeman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> From: "Steve Stallion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > Whoa... slow down Tiger. > > SVR4 is by far a more complete and cohesive packaging format than is > available on any other UNIX or Linux distribution. Essentially there > is no technical merit in tossing SVR4 packaging - not by a long shot. > > That said, SVR4 could certainly use a little help with respect to > usability (pkgadd -D anyone?). > > This was posted earlier, but please take an indepth look into the > packaging guide and see what is provided out of the box - I think you > will agree this beats the pants off of RPM, .deb, and POTS (plain old > tarballs). > > I would like to invite you to take a look at what Blastwave has > accomplished with respect to integrating a GNU runtime. You might be > pleasantly surprised to see your work already done for you. > > Steve > the more I look at the structure of SVR4 packages, the more I think you're right. I'll cop to being a relative novice with them. There are a few things that I look for in a package format that it doesn't seem to provide, though I'm happy to learn that I'm wrong. - an embedded package signature. In the Linux world these are gpg sigs, though there's no reason why they have to be any particular method. For verifying integrity and associating them with a package publisher I trust, though, I find a signature valuable
Creating Signed Packages: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0406/6mg76stf9?q=sign&a=view
- meta-packages: There are a number of ways to provide, for example, SMTP capability. If I develop a package which requires SMTP, but doesn't need a particular version of sendmail, postfix, etc., tracking the dependency against the availability of an SMTP providing meta-package simplifies a lot of things. Ditto for multiple providers of perl, ftp server ... This capability could also allow for dummy packages if I, for some reason, build/install a dependency outside of the package framework. I could indicate the dep is in fact satisfied w/o ignoring it.
I don't think it has this ability directly, though you could accomplish something similar through request scripts.
- Names/descriptions that exceed the 256 char pkginfo NAME limit. this may just be a research failure on my part, but I didn't see a location for longer, sentence/paragraph length descriptions.
This is the one failing I know of. Of course when installing a package you can have a significantly longer description shown in the "copyright" notice. -- "Less is only more where more is no good." --Frank Lloyd Wright Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
