[OpenIndiana-discuss] Questions about /var/pkg

[Till Wegmueller]

Hi Mathew

It is a special statement for /var/pkg/publisher you will get stale data 
due to how the Metadata download process works. This directory MUST 
always go forward in time from it's perspective. Meaning it MUST be 
inside the Boot Environment. At least as long as nobody rewrites that :)

I can give you some details on the process if needed. But the gist is 
that there are pre split JSON files pkg downloads and merged into the 
existing metadata under the publisher. Then it merged that into the 
global cache. Nobody has ever tested if IPS has a detection mechanism if 
there are stale files in this directory. This is fully undocumented 
territory as it was done in the last days of OpenSolaris. OmniOS IPS 
might have such detections now but somebeody(Maybe you?) would need to 
merge in that version of IPS. Solaris IPS is also open and wen could 
cherry-pick from there if we want [0]. I do not know which IPS Helios is 
using but i would assume OmniOS's one. In any case you can make a full 
cache refresh with `pkg refresh --full` and sometimes that is needed to 
recover from situations where the cache is broken.

As side note there was a project to merge the IPS forks but it hit my 
ENOTIME. If you want to pick that up and make improvements on the 
metadata process I am happy to help.

-Till

[0] https://github.com/oracle/solaris-ips

On 13.01.2024 01:11, Matthew R. Trower wrote:
> Hi Till,
> 
> To clarify, I only wish to share /var/pkg/publisher.  /var/pkg clearly 
> contains image-specific data, and bad bad things would happen if that 
> were shared.
> 
> Does your statement still apply specifically to /var/pkg/publisher?
> 
> -- Matthew R. Trower
> 
> 
> On 1/12/24 12:25, Till Wegmueller wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>  From personal experience, Yes this data is kind of a cache. It is 
>> later merged into the publisher independant JSON. However you MUST NOT 
>> share this between BE's this directory is not safe to go back in time 
>> due to how partial download and merging works. Do NOT share /var/pkg 
>> between BE's
>>
>> -Till
>>
>> On 12.01.2024 06:16, Matthew R. Trower wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> 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?
>>>
>>>
>>> -- Matthew R. Trower
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> openindiana-discuss mailing list
>>> openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
>>> https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
>>
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> 
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