[OpenIndiana-discuss] Enhancement to IPS (pkg)??

[Albert Lee]

On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Sunay Tripathi
<tripathi.sunay at gmail.com> wrote:
> Guys,
>
> Let me introduce myself. My name is Sunay Tripathi who *had* been with
> Sun/Solaris for a long long time and tinkered around with the OS. Its
> great to see you guys taking the initiative. I was looking to see if
> people were looking to take any major projects. Given the focus
> around packaging, some work around IPS would be useful. Specially
> related to file based URIs. The dependency on someone else's repo
> has been the most complained about part of IPS from general community.
>
> For instance, you could have all the packages in file form in SVR4
> and write scipts to install identical system without needing the
> network was something useful and I think we never completed that work
> in IPS. I wrote some more on my thoughts on what it takes to make
> a open source OS succeed in long term here
>
> http://sunaytripathi.wordpress.com/2010/10/23/solaris-as-an-open-source-alternative-to-linux/
>
> Anyway, if there is some interest from people to work in this area, we
> can start a discussion.
>
> Again, keep up the good work.
>
> Cheers,
> Sunay
>

Hi Sunay,
Glad to have you on board! Most of us are familiar with your
transformation of the networking space. (I remember meeting you at a
dinner after last year's LISA).

Shawn Walker at Oracle has been leading the on-disk package repository
support, and the format of on-disk repositories has been finalised.
You can install packages directly from a file:// URI without a
temporary depot server, and indeed we use this functionality in the
process of constructing the distribution, as several consolidations
are imported directly from on-disk repositories. There is additionally
a pax-based stream format for a single file, like SVR4's stream
format, I don't know if the tools for manipulating this are done. The
spec for both is here:
http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/pkg/gate/doc/on-disk-format.txt

-Albert