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

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Sunay Tripathi
<tripathi.sunay at gmail.com> wrote:
> IPS is open. Lot of things around install aren't. A lot of them aren't
> even done including upgrade from S10, jumpstart etc. Now you probably
> just wanna run it on desktop but unless there is a commercial
> viability of this OS, its not gonna very far. And if you were
> implying that caiman is open, yes thats true. And if that was the
> full installer, S11 would be shipping about now.

I know that lots of the Solaris 10 install code isn't open and that's
fine.  What parts of the code that you can presently use to install
OpenIndiana aren't open?  Both pkg and caiman still need work but as
far as I can tell they're all I need to install a copy of OpenIndiana
and they're both open.

I also don't think that the only "commercial viability" of OpenIndiana
will come from being to upgrade existing Solaris 10 installs.  Surely
we want it to be commercially viable for free-standing new deployments
as well -- a goal which is not, as far as I can tell, insurmountably
distant.

> I don't think you understand how mirrors work.

Respectfully I believe that I do understand how mirrors work.  I've
been creating them one-way-or-another since before Oracle bought Sun.
Before OI you could create a mirror by downloading all of the
manifests and package files (using ips-mirror.py or some other script)
and run pkg.depotd out of the resultant tree.  Now that OI is here and
is actually interested in folks being able to mirror there are
official tarball drops and an rsync service available serving the
various pkg repos that you need to install OI.

> And the kernel is small part of all you need to have a operating environment.

Absolutely, I was merely highlighting the fact that there is
absolutely a present consumer of the file:// URI style and it clearly
functions against a local file-based repository layout.

> Do an experiment
> for me at your home. Disconnect the internet, just try your local
> machines as publisher and see if you can bring up a new system which
> has all that you need (to start with, just build and compile the
> ON bits).

You can absolutely do this today.  OpenIndiana provides a full copy of
both "/dev" (current OI packages) and "/legacy" (a mirror of the
OpenSolaris "/dev" repo).  If you download these and run a local
pkg.depotd then you can install without the Internet.  It also turns
out that you can download both of these and merely run an Apache
server with a few ksh scripts (as I described in my blog entry) to
provide the same functionality.

> I do appreciate your enthusiasm in using things and that is the right
> approach. Things are by far no where near complete to be palatable in
> enterprise but let people like me worry about that.

I'm glad that people like you are worrying about it, but I think I'll
continue to worry about it as well if that's perfectly alright.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
UNIX Admin/Developer
http://blog.sysmgr.org