From owner-freebsd-libh  Mon Oct 23 15: 5:36 2000
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To: kientzle@acm.org
Cc: Alexander Langer <alex@big.endian.de>, libh@freebsd.org,
	"Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: BOF at BSDCon: FreeBSD Installer, Packages System 
In-Reply-To: Message from Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org> 
   of "Mon, 23 Oct 2000 12:19:38 PDT." <39F48F4A.38D458C2@acm.org> 
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 15:05:22 -0700
Message-ID: <9947.972338722@winston.osd.bsdi.com>
From: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com>
Sender: owner-freebsd-libh@FreeBSD.ORG
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> * ZIP access?  Have you written your own, or just incorporated
>   pre-written libraries?   The official ZIP specification puts

We've written our own.

>   Also, have you done anything to address ZIP's relatively poor
>   compression?  (tar.gz files are consistently much smaller than ZIP

I don't think this is such a big deal anymore since disk space has
quintupled while prices fell proportionately.  It's a measurable
difference, yes, but by no means as important a difference as it
was 10 years ago.

>   A better approach, in my opinion, is to stick with tar.gz, but
>   with a slight twist: put the manifest/package definition information
>   first (possibly just a free-form text file and/or install script?)

That sort of works (for a grotty definition of "works") but the
problem is also in getting things out selectively from that point
forward.  Using tar.gz format, the very idea of multi-architecture
"fat packages" or extract-by-property features pretty much go out the
window given that you can't just apply a name-mangling algorithm and
have the random-access you need to just pluck the relevant "hashed"
item out.

> * Consolidating package/distribution formats needs to be done
>   carefully.  In particular, there are different security issues:
>   e.g., packages should generally be prohibited from dropping bits
>   into /bin or /etc.

That's all covered under the libh security model which allows you to
restrict, override or augment any of the mutagenic file primitives.

> * An idea that gets floated around periodically, but never apparently
>   taken seriously:  packages should install into private directories.
>   /usr/local is becoming a real tarpit.  Instead, package foo-3.4 should

It's not so much that it isn't taken seriously as that it's hard.  A
lot of software (like emacs) hard-codes its path information into the
compiled binaries and makes the resulting packages non-relocatable
without the services of a binary editor and a hell of a lot of luck.

>      * it removes the need for a temporary installation directory,
>        while still permitting easy rollback

Roll-back should be handled by the history stack, as described in
my paper.  That way a roll-back of n (where n > 1) is supported
to cover some of the scenarios also given in my paper.

- Jordan


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