Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 09:08:01 -0700 (PDT) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: Package management (was Re: Come on guys, close a PR or two, Message-ID: <199804171608.JAA11244@pau-amma.whistle.com>
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>Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 14:24:02 +1000 (EST) >From: Peter Jeremy <Peter.Jeremy@alcatel.com.au> [Much elided -- dhw] >BTW, how much commercial s/w actually uses that ABI? I manage a >couple of Sun's at work. They have a variety of commercial s/w >installed on them (eg Interleaf, Oracle, Netscape, Adobe Acrobat, >DataViews, Lotus Notes, Tektronix X-terminal s/w, Hummingbird >Express/Host, HP JetAdmin, INSO DynaText). Apart from Sun software, >the _only_ package that installs as a `standard' SystemV package is >JetAdmin. Everything else installs via some non-standard procedure. ? As to the point that a lot of (commercial) stuff fails to use the "package" mechanism, yes, that's annoying (and your efforts to get the vendors to approximate reasonableness are to be commended!) But what has that to do with an "ABI"? >Of course, Unix does not have a happy track-record of such agreements >(BSD vs AT&T, OSF vs USL/UI, (Linux vs itself) vs (OpenBSD vs >NetBSD vs FreeBSD) vs commercial Unices), so I don't intend to hold >my breath :-(. Indeed. :-( >This would also make it relatively easy to support multiple, different >package formats (as long as the command-line interfaces were not too >dissimilar). I don't see that as a necessary condition, if a "wrapper" interface might be reasonably fabricated. >And one requirement I left off was that is needs to be relatively easy >to create packages (ie write the install driver file). I've >previously avoided using the SystemV packages for this reason (I >actually wound up using the FreeBSD package management as a base). I confess that I find this a little surprising. Granted, what I did last summer with sendmail for a Solaris 2.x environment wasn't all that complex, but it seemed to be functional... and if I were to be creating a "package", doing about that level of work would be something that I woudl consider reasonable. (Bear in mind, please, that I quite agree with is the requirement that folks -- sysadmins like myself, rather than kernel hackers, for example -- should be able to create packages.) BTW: implication, there, is that it should be possible to *test* that the package install works -- if nothing else, be able to say "use /foo/bletch as root, thank you very much". Would also be useful to say "show me what you would have done had this not been a test". david -- David Wolfskill dhw@whistle.com (650) 577-7158 pager: (650) 401-0168 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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