2008/6/27 Moinak Ghosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 7:39 PM, James Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Kristian Rink writes: >>> Mauro Mozzarelli schrieb: >>> > Please, could you expand on your statement? Why would it be a bad >>> > idea? To me, it would solve most of the problems we have today with >>> > OpenSolaris on having to create redundant sub-installations of most >>> > of the operating system dependencies, only to install a package like, >>> > for example, "mplayer" from blastwave. >>> >>> How? >> >> It wouldn't have any effect on that problem. >> >> The blastwave problem is that the repository (in general; there are >> exceptions) aims to be self-contained and to run on Solaris 8 and >> higher. That means that many packages declare a wealth of >> dependencies, and those dependencies are to other blastwave packages >> that carry the libraries needed. >> >> In order to fix this "problem," someone would have to figure out a way >> to make a blastwave package that depends optionally on either a >> system-installed copy of the "foobar" library or, if that's not >> available, a blastwave variant of "foobar." Then you'd have to make >> sure that it links to the right one at run time, and you'd have to >> make sure all of the versioning lines up -- meaning that the blastwave >> copy of "foobar" would likely be constrained to versions that happen >> to be compatible with the system-supplied ones. >> >> No matter _what_ packaging mechanism is used, that's a tall order. I >> certainly don't blame anyone for not tackling it. I suspect it might >> not be fixable in any real sense at all. > > It appears to be fixable. > RPM does have features that make this possible via the Provides > clause. A package like say SUNWgnome-base-libs can mention: I provide > libpango-version, libgtk-version, libglib-version and so on. Another package > needing those libs can say: I require libpango, version >= <version>, > libglib, version >= <version> and so on. The package system evaluates > these dynamically and figures out appropriate dependencies without > having to explicitly bind to package names from specific repositories. > I find this feature extremely powerful and generic. > > This does not mean that I am suggesting RPM for OpenSolaris. However > this is something that Pkg should have looked at IMHO. I did mention > this time and again in various contexts.
It was looked at, and is something still be considered. How dependencies work is very much still being discussed. This has definitely not been ignored. -- Shawn Walker _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
