[OpenIndiana-discuss] Package lists

[Alasdair Lumsden]

Hi Taemun,

On 24 Oct 2010, at 04:27, taemun wrote:

> Someone on Debian-testing has added rows for claws-mail and pgadmin3, and
> I'm going to have to remove them.
> 
> The layout of that sheet is intentionally following that of distrowatch
> (Column A is of the form "abiword (2.8.6)", which Columns B & C are
> automatically updated from). The number of rows exactly matches the number
> in each of the pages, eg
> http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=openindiana (after you hit
> Refresh in the middle of the page).
> 
> If people start adding rows which don't match this format, when we try to
> update automatically (ie, copy and paste columns) then it's all going to
> break.
> 
> If we're going to start a wishlist (as I presume Mr Debian was trying), this
> should be on another sheet, or possibly in a Wiki page. Thoughts?

Sounds completely sane/reasonable.

> Ken Mays: whilst there is a whole bunch of software available from other
> sources, I thought it would be nice to show that which is available simply
> by typing "pkg install <name>".
> 
> eg, on Ubuntu you'd type apt-get install blender and get:
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/maverick/blender
> 
> (Possibly a better example would have been JRE - 6u18 is avail in repo, and
> 6u22 from Oracle directly. I'd want to see 6u18 in the list, personally.)
> 
> Maybe that isn't the direction that Alasdair wanted this to go in. Could you
> adjudicate?

Your interpretation is what I was after - the idea is the list should reflect what gets installed when people run "[apt-get|pkg|yum] install packagename", from the main software source for that distribution. So For JRE I'd expect to see 6u18 too.

> Lastly, I'd love to see some kind of alias system worked out for pkg,
> whereby typing "pkg install libvorbis" can work out by itself that libvorbis
> is part of the ogg_vorbis pkg, and just go get that. Having to type pkg
> search libvorbis*, then work out what you want manually is a bit time
> consuming. Another option would be to just split packages into their
> components. If something depends upon libvorbis and libogg, both will get
> downloaded, anyway. I'm not sure how package consolidation is a good thing.

This sort of feedback is definitely appreciated. I fully expect that a lot of packages need refactoring.

There is a part of IPS called facets, which isn't widely used yet, but the idea behind it is you can have a package (eg ogg_vorbis), which could have a docs facet, a libs facet and an everything facet, letting you pick and choose which bits of the package get installed. This could make more sense than splitting things out to multiple separate packages. However there are pros and cons to both approaches, and I know nothing of the facets system having not yet had time to investigate it.

I'm not sure what work could be done to IPS to make it better at suggestions, but having sanely named and well organised packages to begin with would be a good start.

Cheers,

Alasdair