Shawn Walker wrote: > They seemed strongly opposed to having any special software for the > depot server. Bart was there and so explained some of the benefits of > having a depot server that could do posts: > > * Ability to perform searches without having to download a catalog > > * Ability to get various listings and other information from the server > directly > > There were a few others he mentioned, but they've slipped my mind. > > The one thing I could agree on was that it might be better in the long > term to allow full catalog, filelist, and file operations to happen > off a "standard" webserver, while all other operations would require a > special depot server. > > I still really like the fact that ips has a rich set of server functionality. > > That's something I haven't seen any of the other packaging systems do. > > They all off-load the logic onto the client. >
The big fundamental issue is searching for information about content that's not installed on your system. If the server can only supply files, you're forced to download manifests for any and all pkgs you wish to search. While perhaps tractable for one thousand packages, this is clearly broken for ten or one hundred thousand. By placing the large scale search functions in the server, the cost of maintaining indices is handled in a single place, rather than replicated in each image. When I compile open source software on a stock 2008.05 system, various components will be missing; however, they're easily and quickly found w/ pkg search -r: : [EMAIL PROTECTED]; time pkg search -r Xatom.h INDEX PACKAGE basename pkg:/[EMAIL PROTECTED],5.11-0.85:20080402T100140Z basename pkg:/[EMAIL PROTECTED],5.11-0.79:20080205T151741Z basename file usr/X11/include/X11/Xatom.h pkg:/[EMAIL PROTECTED] basename file usr/X11/include/X11/Xatom.h pkg:/[EMAIL PROTECTED] basename file usr/X11/include/X11/Xatom.h pkg:/[EMAIL PROTECTED] basename file usr/X11/include/X11/Xatom.h pkg:/[EMAIL PROTECTED] real 0m0.327s user 0m0.111s sys 0m0.046s : [EMAIL PROTECTED]; The traditional way of handling this w/ svr4 pkgs was to find a machine that had everything installed and grep in /var/sadm/install/contents, or find an install server and grep through the pkgmap files. - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blogs.sun.com/barts "You will contribute more with mercurial than with thunderbird." _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
