Philip Brown wrote: > Danek Duvall wrote: > >>> well, oracle is a huge horrible complex beast, that always seems to require >>> more handholding than one might think. >>> What about things considerably less complex than oracle, though? What do >>> you >>> think the "best" way of handling that sort of thing is? >> The best way is always going to be that the software responsible for >> managing the data is capable of reading old formats for some period of time >> after it stops writing those formats by default, and either doing an >> automatic conversion, or allowing the customer to decide when that >> conversion happens -- should they ever wish to downgrade, or the data is >> shared between systems that might have different revisions of the database >> software. See ZFS for one example of where this works quite smoothly. > > You seem to be saying, "'properly' written software, should never even see > this as an issue; it should just behave well in all circumstances". > > Well, that would certainly be very nice; However, in the real world, not all > software is written that way :-) > Do you want a packaging system that only works well with 95% of software out > there, or do you want a packaging system that works with 99% of software? > > You may say that 95% is good enough. My perspective, is that it's the 4% > difference, the "tricky" software packages out there, are the ones that > people *most want handled for them* !
Busted software is just that: busted. IPS doesn't contain a debugger, either. Packaging is about laying down files and keeping track of dependencies, versions, etc. A packaging system that is Turing complete is a bug, not a feature. > If you do not allow arbitrary script execution, then you limit the package > maintainer's ability to do that. You thereby limit their effectiveness as a > package maintainer. > Our assertion is that pkg install time is the wrong time to do this in the general case. It might work for application software that's never installed on diskless clients or packaged as part of an appliance. - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blogs.sun.com/barts _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
