Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 22:04:02 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu> Cc: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, Peter Korsten <peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Microsoft brainrot (was: r-cmds and DNS and /etc/host.conf) Message-ID: <14950.875682242@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 01 Oct 1997 00:36:13 EDT." <Pine.BSF.3.96.971001002405.289D-100000@Journey2.mat.net>
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> OK. You mean this (I guess, from above) that this includes the ports > packages. One shortcoming of ports is that the packages aren't aware of There are only two current distribution formats that I know of - the "package", e.g. a specialized tarball and a "distribution", e.g. an ordinary tarball that's been split into pieces. These two need to be unified, is what I'm saying. > Do you have any other complaints on our present packaging mechanism? Oh, I have loads. ;-) But that's an entirely different thread, and I've actually noted all of this in great detail in the past. Might have to search the mail archives a bit to find the exact references. > Seems like you're asking for the package tools to be able to do the pkg > install, then automatically run specified scripts/programs that the writer > installed in place in the package, to do the setup. Right? That's all I > see here, and not a big stretch. Uh, no, I'm talking about something considerably more complex than that. I'm talking about an entire API for doing "packagy" things, up to and including "generic user interaction" (e.g. I make an outcall from the package installer to "get this yes-or-no confirmation" and that turns into different types of UI interaction depending on what the users' capability at the time is) - our failure to do that at the moment is why certain packages do bad bad things when you try and add them from sysinstall's package installer. :-( Needless to say, proper "registration" of files would also be handled through this API so that you didn't have the version-smashing problem you mentioned. Again, I'm *not* just talking about calling pkg_add from scripts - I'm talking about taking the functionality of pkg_add and putting it into a library so that any utility which wishes to provide an "execution harness" for a package's extraction can easily do so. > I don't think the core functionality of getting the partitions built, and > the base downloaded/installed, can be done in a package mode. I would > want that still to be a bootstrapping type thing. Disagree? Actually, there's no reason whatsoever why those sorts of operations couldn't be done from a package. ;-) It probably wouldn't be a typical case, but many of those function would be available to packages operating in a highly privileged mode. Stop thinking of them so much as packages and more as "canned procedures", only one potential operation in which being the addition or replacement of files on the system. Jordan
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