[OpenIndiana-discuss] what do pkg install phases mean?

[Peter Tribble]

On Sun, Mar 5, 2023 at 4:19 PM Till Wegmüller <toasterson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
>
> IPS works on images of the OS. And it does so in an Atomic way. Speed is
> not the main goal. Stability is.
>

As a historical interlude, speed was very much a key focus of creating IPS
to replace
SVR4 packaging. One of the key criticisms of the old packaging system was
that it
was considered inordinately slow (one manifestation of this was that the
development
workflow for Solaris involved installing updated bits, SVR4 was too slow
for impatient
engineers, hence bfu as a hack, but that rendered the system unsupportable,
but is
what led to onu).

The emphasis on performance can be seen in several areas of the design -
downloading
and updating just the files you need rather than whole packages;
eliminating the overhead
of maintaining the shared contents file.

It's unfortunate that the original aim of improving performance got lost
along the way.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/