[OpenIndiana-discuss] Please stop retrofitting packages to require live images

[Jason J. W. Williams]

Hi Guys,

I noticed that all of my Chef-maintained OpenIndiana servers hadn't
checked in for 4 days, when I went to discover why, it's because the
gcc package no longer allows the --deny-new-be flag:

bash-4.0# pkg  install -q --accept --deny-new-be gcc-3 at 3.4.3
The proposed operation cannot be performed on a live image.


This is a huge issue for Chef and Puppet. The reason is that when pkg
creates a new BE for a package, Chef/Puppet make the configuration
file changes in the currently live BE. When you reboot, you end up
with an inconsistent environment missing all of the changes Chef
deployed simply because pkg decided a new BE was required.  So far
I've just been culling those package from Chef's control that cause
the issue, but GCC is not one I can do that with.

Please allow us to override BE creation at our discretion with --deny-new-be.

-J