[OpenIndiana-discuss] Questions about /var/pkg

[Matthew R. Trower]

On 1/12/24 03:19, Marcel Telka wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 11, 2024 at 11:16:21PM -0600, Matthew R. Trower wrote:
>> Is the format of /var/pkg/publisher committed at this point?  It looks to
>> contain cached data and downloads from publishers, which ought not to be
>> tied to any particular BE. If I create a ZFS dataset to share that among
>> BEs, am I going to run into trouble?
>>
>> What exactly are the contents of /var/pkg/lost+found?  Can any files I
>> discover in there be safely deleted?
> 
> Please read the pkg(1) manpage to find some answers to your questions.
> 

Thanks.  Sometimes I forget that illumos manpages are generally of 
higher quality than some other *nix variants.  What I have learned:

/var/pkg/publisher is exactly what I thought it was.  I am still not 
clear as to whether the format is committed(stable) across different 
versions of pkg5, and therefore safe to share across BEs.

/var/pkg/lost+found is... well, I still don't know.  The language is... 
a bit odd.  I think it's saying that if I have files in my filesystem 
which are not part of an IPS package, and pkg installs files in their 
place, those original files will be moved here.  However, are there 
other situations in which files will be deposited here?  Or will the 
files there only ever be my files, which have no relation to IPS?

In any event, I guess IPS doesn't care about them, and I should be free 
to delete them if they are uninteresting to me.


-- Matthew R. Trower