[OpenIndiana-discuss] Questions about /var/pkg

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On Sat, 13 Jan 2024 at 16:18, Goetz T. Fischer <g.fischer at r-a-c.de> wrote:
> no, such a comparison would of course be pointless.

On Sat, 13 Jan 2024 at 16:30, Goetz T. Fischer <g.fischer at r-a-c.de> wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Jan 2024 15:36:40 -0800, Bill Sommerfeld via openindiana-discuss wrote:
> > don't assume the SAT solver is eating it all
> i would assume

I think this thread has achieved all it's likely to achieve.  If
people want to work on IPS, there are any number of productive avenues
-- but it's going to be _work_, not endless mailing list threads, and
not guessing at or assuming things.

If you want things to be better, you should:

  - look at what OmniOS are doing with their IPS fork

  - look at the IPS changes Alan pointed to and see how many can be
made to work here

  - profile your system to see why it's actually slow, not just assume
or guess, and make the slow parts go faster

The original question that started the thread is obviously very
reasonable: in theory much of the bulk data that IPS stores should not
need to be tied to a particular boot environment -- provided it is
stored in a long-term stable format, or it can reliably be destroyed
and recreated from upstream sources when that format needs to change.

I don't think it's ever going to be wise to try and mount datasets
from outside the boot environment on top of subdirectories for
arbitrary system components, IPS included.  Instead, if you would like
it to work that way, it would be best to get IPS to directly support
doing this.

If you want inspiration, Oracle appear to have introduced
"rpool/VARSHARE", a dataset that gets mounted as "/var/share" but
which is common to all boot environments.  Data that need not be
BE-managed can live there instead of being duplicated in each BE.
Either this, or something like this, would seem to be pretty
reasonable for a number of things in the core OS and in IPS.  But
that's going to take work, which anybody who wants that feature can
do!  Interminable list discussion is unlikely to help.

Cheers.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
http://blog.sysmgr.org