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

[Sunay Tripathi]

> 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 am all for new installed base. All the power to you. I am being
sincere here and not sarcastic. But can you explain what you are
doing to achieve that? New features, new deployment model, or
something else? Would appreciate a meaningful response instead of
more chest thumping.

>> 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.

The mirror code that we wrote actually still depends on the origin
server being available. It was a mirror for data only. Maybe something
changed in last few months but quick look at the putbacks don't
show any explicit putback addressing this. Is this something you
fixed personally or is fixed in OI? I would love to try this out.

>> 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.

So you would expect people to write their own script to achieve this.
Why would you not allow the pkg system to do it for you with a simple
command? Running pkg.depotd is for developer and not end users in my
opinion.

>> 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.

Sorry about the last comment. I think every community member should
worry about it. And seems like you are quite capable. I am not trying
to imply that you don't know what you are doing. I was just trying
to steer you towards making it easy for people who don't have your
skill set to actually be able to run Solaris.

Cheers,
Sunay