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

[Sunay Tripathi]

On 10/24/10 09:58 PM, Joshua M. Clulow wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 3:20 PM, Sunay Tripathi
> <tripathi.sunay at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> 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'll be the first to admit that I don't have all (or indeed many) of
> the answers.  My small and recent contribution is trying to make some
> kind of AI process available to people who don't already have an OI
> infrastructure -- which I assume is still most people!

And not knowing all the answers and admitting that and at the same
time chipping away at practical pieces is exactly the right approach.
And this piece you are working on is really a very useful piece.

>> 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.
>
> This appears to be an issue of terminology.  When I (and many others)
> talk about mirroring I guess we mean re-creating our own independent
> origin depot rather than using pkg's inbuilt "mirror" functionality
> which appears to be of somewhat questionable value.

There is a long history on why we did mirror the way we did and why
file based URI took this long. There was some desire in Sun business
community to keep things tied to the mothership while my approach was
to let it be free but given that the company still needed to make
money, compromises were made.

> The files in here ...
>    http://dlc.openindiana.org/repos/oi_147_spin2.tar.bz2
> ... coupled with the OI rsync service for the depot allow the creation
> of a complete and up-to-date mirror in the traditional sense (i.e. a
> free-standing copy) rather than in the pkg(5)-specific sense which
> means just the file/ data and not the manifests.

I will have a look.

>>> 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.
>
> Well, no, I actually provide the ksh scripts and the canned responses
> and even the Apache VirtualHost snippets required to make it work.
> It's also just a rough draft for the minimisation of the footprint
> required to run an AI server.
>
>> 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.
>
> Well, if you want to run pkg.depotd (as I would suggest that you
> probably do if you're running OS or OI) then that's fine -- there's an
> SMF service that you can point at your tarball+rsynced repository
> tree.  It's described in the OI wiki and other available literature.
> This task is arguably less complicated than extracting the Solaris 10
> media and invoking the Jumpstart setup scripts.

I missed looking at this before hand. Let me check this out before we
go further. But I would point out that SMF service is fine. Its the
tarball/rsync process to get the bits that worrying. It would be good
to make the creation of the local repo simple without needing to
download the repo using rsync etc. It would be good for end users
if they can point the pkg command to (say OI) origin server and clone
the entire repo which start the SMF services etc under the cover
(maybe as an option). Perhaps you have already done this or headed in
this direction. Again, I am not the target for this. The target is the
end user who doesn't even know what rsync is. Think Ubuntu in this
sense.

>> 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.
>
> To be fair, historically Jumpstart has been complicated and brittle
> and a steep learning curve for new users.  Bolt-on scripts and
> toolsets like SUNWjet have sprung up to try and make it easier to
> install and run Solaris over the network.

I am in total agreement on this. But then we never did anything to
help install/upgrade of large number of machines. Ai is was first
such effort which still needs work.

Anyway, I should let you get back to work. I will try and have a
look at what all changes OI has done.

Cheers,
Sunay