From: Luke Kanies Date: 19:33 on 25 May 2006 Subject: Solaris packaging sucks, too As was already discussed this week, packaging should consist of a packaging technology and a package retrieval/install technology, whether they're integrated or not. Solaris stupidly has no retrieval tech builtin, and their packaging software itself is pretty braindead. People are now starting to use packages compiled by Blastwave or SunFreeWare, which each provide a pkg-get script that will retrieve and install packages for you. Of course, those scripts behave completely differently, and the package repositories are entirely incompatible, but whatever. So, I pick Blastwave for various reasons. You go to install a single package, it basically works, other than asking you all kinds of inane questions that amount to "are you sure?". Then, six months later, you go to upgrade a package, ruby in this case. Because Sun's package system is stupid, the current package has to be removed, rather than just being replaced. You get a bunch of warnings that other packages depend on this package, and you just ignore those warnings. It downloads the ruby package, tries to install ruby, and fails, because you need to upgrade some other package. Note that you now do not have an installed ruby package. Okay, so you upgrade the prerequisite package and go to install ruby again. This is where it gets really ridiculous: The package retrieval now fails because it's already been retrieved once. The script isn't smart enough not to download the package again, and upon downloading it again it's not smart enough to replace the existing, uncompressed package, it just bails entirely. So, now you have to go and manually delete the package, go to upgrade again, get told another package needs to be upgraded, and you're stuck. You're only reasonable choice at that point is to upgrade all packages, even though it's not at all what you want. Oh, and yeah, you're going to be asked a whole bunch of stupid questions -- you have to sit there synchronously saying "yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes" to the stupid computer. Grrr.
From: David Champion Date: 20:05 on 25 May 2006 Subject: Re: Solaris packaging sucks, too * On 2006.05.25, in <Pine.LNX.4.58.0605251325460.7685@xxxxxx.xxxxxxx.xxx>, * "Luke Kanies" <luke@xxxxxxx.xxx> wrote: > > Solaris stupidly has no retrieval tech builtin, and their packaging software > ... > Because Sun's package system is stupid, the current package has to be > removed, rather than just being replaced. You get a bunch of warnings that Sun's packaging system is Not Nice, and I don't oppose any hate on it for what it is. But this here is a hate on what it isn't. Your problem isn't because Sun's system is stupid; it works fine for Sun, who don't put upgrade packages on teh Intarwebs for you to download. What's stupid is that SFW and Blastwave *use* Sun's packaging system, which isn't really a solution to their set of problems. ... Back when I cared about this kind of thing, and didn't have me own software distribution farm that's good enough (despite being rather hateful in its own very special ways), I used rpm on Solaris. But that was in 1996/7, when rpm 3 was fairly focused and not excessively (Jeff Johnson, looking at you!) convoluted. I had use patterns that just worked. But as it tumbled toward version 4, everything I wanted to do broke and I found that I really had to *be concerned with* rpm to keep my package base up. That was enough of that. I just wanted to use it, not to have a relationship. Now I just hate all packaging systems.
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