[oi-dev] Can I still install older perl and python?

[Gordon Ross]

Well, the point really is this.  I can (still), outside of IPS
go grab the Python 2.6 packages from the repo server
and install them and they work [1].  Why should the
packaging system go out of it's way to prevent that?
Instead, IPS says "you _must_ remove this"
(because the package was marked obsolete).

The policy is:  This is obsolete so you can't install it.
A more helpful policy might look like:
We're going to remove this for you, but if you like
you can still go install it by it's explicit version...
(or something like that).

[1] Old packages like this work well because in
illumos we have _excellent_ backwards compatibility.

Whatever, I guess I've vented enough...


On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 10:11 AM, Alexander Pyhalov <alp at rsu.ru> wrote:
> On 05/12/17 05:01 PM, Gordon Ross wrote:
>>
>> Admittedly, this one of the things about IPS that has
>> long bother me.  It's very "opinionated".
>> IPS "knows better" than I do what packages should
>> be installed, and in what versions, etc. and if I don't
>> happen to agree (i.e. in this case, please don't just
>> remove Python 2.5) well, that's just too bad.
>
>
> It's true for any distribution. For example, on updating my Ubuntu web
> servers, python 3 was updated from 3.4 to 3.6 (IIRC) and I had to rebuild
> modules which were used by application. I don't think this is an issue. The
> issue is the absence of releases, when we say, that this interface is
> supported for one major release. Long discussed /stable branch and question
> of its life cycle. But again, I'm not going to support several git branches
> of OI. If someone wants it, he is really welcome.
>
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Alexander Pyhalov,
> system administrator of Southern Federal University IT department