Bart Smaalders wrote: > So you would find the Marvell Yukon ethernet interface SVR4 driver package > that prompts for IP address, netmask, etc, during installation to be a > model to emulate? > > The packaging system must be able to install the software w/o running > any of it. You are conflating configuration and installation. What > happens if I > wish to make a change in configuration post-installation?
I have never said that. Configuration that requires human intervention is a separate matter, for a number of reasons. Factory install is my favorite reason. That is not what package scripts in Solaris are used for. (Yes, the infrastructure allows it, but by convention Sun doesn't use that capability.) In my experience, the same is true of RPM scripts, though there I am not as familiar with the conventions. I am very concerned with the kind of configuration that requires human intervention, but that has been only a small fraction of this discussion. What I am concerned with here are those operations that do *not* require human intervention, that are to be the same for every installation - registering SMF services, plugging items into system-default menus, plugging helper applications into /etc/mailcap, adding device drivers to a bunch of files in /etc, adding file recognizers to /etc/magic, adding fonts to fonts.dir files, updating man page windex files, adding terminal definitions to /etc/termcap, adding entries to /etc/security/*_attr, and a host of other application-specific plug-in actions too large to enumerate. Even if you believe that all of those things can be done "lazily", either when the application is next run or when the system is next booted, removal is not so easy. It would be impolite to remove a service's files without first shutting down the service, or to remove files that are still referenced through these plug-in mechanisms. As I've said, if you want to break that process into a "packaging" layer and an "installation" layer, that's OK... but then the primary user interface must be the "installation" layer, because if the user executes the primitive packaging operations directly the plug-in/unplug actions won't be performed appropriately. _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
