[OpenIndiana-discuss] Gnuplot on 2024.10?

[Andreas Wacknitz]

Am 28.06.25 um 23:47 schrieb Reginald Beardsley via openindiana-discuss:
>   Thank you Andreas!
>
> It did work. It appears it allowed gnuplot to install "wxwidgets-3" by adding a publisher.
It is recommended to update your system regularly. The 
userland-incorporation package is a special meta-package.
It creates a baseline of all packages related to oi-userland. All FMRI's 
(belonging to oi-userland) are fixed by this.
This is intended and should provide working versions(*) of all packages. 
If you remove userland-incorporation this
fixation will be removed and you can install any version of packages you 
like. But sooner or later this will create bigger
problems because it is not guraranteed that newer package versions will 
work with older libc versions to name just one
example.


(*) As we only have a small number of maintainers and no testers at all 
we cannot give real guarantees. We just try our best which should be a 
lot better than no guarantees and no control at all.

>
>
> pkg search wxwidgets
> INDEX ACTION VALUE PACKAGE
> pkg.summary set wxWidgets - Cross-Platform GUI Library pkg:/library/graphics/wxwidgets-3 at 3.2.8.1-2025.0.0.0
> pkg.fmri set openindiana.org/library/graphics/wxwidgets pkg:/library/graphics/wxwidgets at 2.8.12-2023.0.0.4
> root at hipster:~#
>
> I only got the last entry when I did a "pkg search wxwidgets" prior to the "pkg update -v" operation. From this I infer that a change was made that allows a package to add a publisher which was not included previously.
pkg search works differently from what you think it does. I recommend to 
search for package names with
pkg list -a|grep wxwidget (as an example). Maybe after pfexec pkg 
refresh --full.


> So what happened, where and why in the "pkg update -v" that changed the behavior? I'm not comfortable not understanding *how* this was done and why I had no information about the change or the need for the change. I attempted to interrogate the gnuplot pkg as much as I could and found no sensible hints of the publisher of the dependent pkg.
"pkg update" updates your local cache of package information and then 
calculates an update path for your installation.
If it finds one it will update all packages on your system that need to 
be updated (adding necessary new and removing obsoleted ones). If 
necessary it will also create a new boot environment and does all the 
changes there. It may be necessary to reboot into such a newly created 
BE. The system can show this to you by issuing "beadm list".
Of course you can steer a lot of things but you'll need to study the 
related man pages in order to get ideas of what is possible and how.
As OpenIndiana is derived from OpenSolaris most documentation of 
OpenSolaris (and also Solaris 11.0) is still applicable.
So I recommend to download this documentation from Oracle (it is still 
available!).


>
> How does one ask a pkg what dependencies it has and from where it expects those to be filled? That information was embedded in some pkg retrieved by "pkg update -v".
>
> The part I find most alarming is I updated the system late last year. Things have become very opaque, and for someone who started with WATFV and punchcards, the loss of discoverability. The ability to find out what the actual operation is, has become very difficult.
>
> Reg
>
>
>
>
> On Saturday, June 28, 2025 at 03:29:22 PM CDT, Reginald Beardsley via openindiana-discuss <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:
>
>
> The jaded old man in me says that "pkg update -v" won't fix the gnuplot problem. It's running, but I'm doubtful of success.
>
> Just in case no one noticed, the gnuplot pkg wants "wxwidgets-3" and such pkg doesn't exist according to "pkg search wxwidgets".
>
> Over 30 years ago I remarked it was easier to get one program to work on 6 different operating systems than it was to get 6 programs working on 1 system. I was referring to >$100k/seat 3rd party packages in the oil industry.
>
> Now things are even worse.
Things have changed over the last decades. Many of the changes made the 
world better.
IPS is just one approach for the new complexity of operating system 
software.

Andreas