[desktop-discuss] [pkg-discuss] Modify pkgbuild to make IPS images

[Bart Smaalders]

Joe Di Pol wrote:
> Danek Duvall wrote:
>>> 3)  All subpackages (-devel, -docs, ...) will have only 1 dependency -
>>>     parent package.  This makes a bit strange order of installing
>>>     packages, but I want to somehow mark package that is sub-package.
>>>     Cause it doesn't make sense to have sdl-devel without main sdl
>>>     package...
>> The way we'd intended to do these was to dump everything into a single
>> package, tag files appropriately, and use filters to install selectively.
>> That is,
>>
>>     file path=usr/lib/libsdl.so.1
>>     file path=usr/lib/libsdl.so devel=true
>>     directory path=usr/include/sdl devel=true
>>     file path=usr/include/sdl/sdl.h devel=true
>>     file path=usr/man/man3/libsdl.3 docs=true
>>
>> etc.  Locale-specific packages would be handled similarly, but there you'd
>> have a "locale" tag which would specify the locale a particular file
>> belonged to.
> 
> I wonder if this is a case were technical elegance is getting in the way
> of familiarity and usability. Tagging and filtering appear to have some
> excellent use cases, but I'm not sure using them to functionally organize
> a package is one.
> 
> Folks are pretty familiar with the concept of a package name reflecting
> what it contains, and being able to use that name to get what they want.
> It's hard to see how filtering is better than "pkg install foo-docs"

Because filtering provides a consistently defined semantic rather than a
series of ad-hoc conventions, and allows people to define clusters
or aggregations of packages w/o worrying about the manifold ancillary
packages that deliver other aspects of the package, such as man pages,
localizations, etc.  Indeed, we can combine SPARC, x86, etc, files in
a single package.  Today, we combine x86 and amd64 binaries in the
same packages, and that will continue to be the case.  But w/ IPS,
we can filter out the amd64 bit binaries easily to target small
32bit VIA systems w/o breaking the packaging mode, updating, etc.

- Bart

-- 
Bart Smaalders			Solaris Kernel Performance
barts at cyber.eng.sun.com		http://blogs.sun.com/barts