Solaris packaging sucks, too

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From: Luke Kanies
Subject: Solaris packaging sucks, too
Date: 19:33 on 25 May 2006
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.

-- 
Hanlon's razor:
   Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by
   stupidity.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com

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