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

[Chris Beal - Solaris Revenue Product Engineering]

Danek Duvall wrote:
>
>> What is pkg_fmri?
>> I checked the man pages in the repo, the slides from the summit, but
>> couldn't make out what the term was meant.
>> smf' already uses the term as "Fault Managed Resource Identifier". Is
>> this term overloaded for pkg?
>>     
>
> It's all part of the same world -- think of an FMRI as representing a fault
> boundary -- a system component which can, in some ways, be thought of as a
> single unit, like a FRU would be in the hardware world.  FMA and SMF
> already use FMRIs, and now IPS does.
>
>   
This is interesting from a maintenance point of view.  Software FRUs 
have been something we struggle with for some time. What is the minimum 
amount of "stuff" we can deliver to resolve a problem. The package FMRI 
being the fault boundary is absolutely the right thing. Would there ever 
be a case of faults propagating across a boundary (ie multiple packages 
needing to be delivered to resolve and  issue). I think it is quite 
likely. Would there ever be a case of delivering only part of a package, 
as we do with patches now? I would rather we didn't.

Chris