Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 15:03:15 -0700 From: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com> To: Cy Schubert - ITSD Open Systems Group <Cy.Schubert@uumail.gov.bc.ca> Cc: Wilko Bulte <wkb@freebie.demon.nl>, Will Andrews <will@physics.purdue.edu>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Packages (was: Re: Rsh/Rlogin/Rcmd & friends) Message-ID: <97976.969055395@winston.osd.bsdi.com> In-Reply-To: Message from Cy Schubert - ITSD Open Systems Group <Cy.Schubert@uumail.gov.bc.ca> of "Fri, 15 Sep 2000 14:25:31 PDT." <200009152125.e8FLPmt26231@cwsys.cwsent.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > Which is, IMHO, not having to select 10^6 different items during
> > sysinstall. That would smell like Linux, right?
>
> What would be wrong with that? Solaris is installed via packages. So
> are the most widely distributed mainframe operating systems (MVS, VM,
> and VSE). AIX installs everything using packages. The fact that
> RedHat has adopted this approach, which has been used for years before
I think people are drawing a false association between "organization"
and "packaging", two things which are currently linked together in
FreeBSD for historical rather than practical reasons.
Let's take FreeBSD's bindist for example. It started life as a simple
sweeping together of everything in "/etc, {/usr,}{/bin,/sbin}" and
that was that. Then people griped that they wanted to not have to
install catpages, so those got scooped out into another tarball before
the bindist packaging phase got run and now the contents of the
aformetioned directories were magically smaller. Then we did the same
with the proflibs, then the manpages (I may have the ordering wrong
here, sue me), etc etc. The eventual result was that you had a
"flat but occasionally deep" set of distributions like:
bin
proflibs
manpages
catpages
ports
...
Where some things like "bin" were still very big and not further
sub-divided at all (still contained docs tools, compilers, etc) and
other things, by collective whim, were removed and shoved up to the
same level in the hierarchy. What people wanted but didn't actually
get was something more like:
[X] bin
[X] base
[ ] proflibs
[ ] manpages
[ ] catpages
[ ] ports
...
And what they'd *really* like is something more like:
[X] bin
[X] base
[X] compiler tools
[X] perl language
[X] documentation formatters
[X] printing
[ ] proflibs
[ ] manpages
[ ] catpages
...
[ ] ports
...
Which actually subdivides bin into all the logical pieces which
comprise it. You'll notice that I also checked some of the items by
default, something which I think it's up to the *installer* to do
ahead of time in response to an earlier "user profile" question.
There's no reason why, if the user selects "Standard", that they
shouldn't get a default set of packages selected which results in the
*exact same* FreeBSD footprint which we all(*) know and love(**)
today. Similarly, if the user knows exactly what they're doing and
they really really hate Perl (just to pick a completely arbitrary and
unbiased example), they can de-select that or simply pick "Custom"
instead of "Standard" in the first place.
If these things are also furthermore packages, then one of us admin
types can come along later during the process of trying to debug this
person's systems and use pkg_info (or whatever follows it) to get an
immediate report of what's installed and go "aha, you didn't install
the compiler tools, no wonder your kernel builds are falling over."
- Jordan
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?97976.969055395>