Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 09:48:21 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: "Alton, Matthew" <Matthew.Alton@anheuser-busch.com> Cc: "Matthew N. Dodd" <winter@jurai.net>, Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au>, Satoshi Asami <asami@FreeBSD.ORG>, phk@FreeBSD.ORG, committers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Come on guys, close a PR or two, will ya ? Message-ID: <16964.892658901@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 15 Apr 1998 10:04:14 CDT." <31B3F0BF1C40D11192A700805FD48BF9017765A1@STLABCEXG011>
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> I'll do it. Please send me pointers. Thank you. Mike, did we ever put to paper any of our TCL-ish designs for "Package System From Hell MkII" or did it all remain on that skanky whiteboard out in the shipping dept? Mike and I sat down about 6 months ago and sketched out the details of the various insane ravings we'd both had on this topic for the last year or two, but we didn't actually implement anything so I imagine our "work" would be of limited use anyway. :-) Some of my (exceedingly verbose) postings on this topic can also probably be culled from the mailing list archives at ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/mailing-lists/ if you look back around 1995-1996, maybe even as early as '94. I wrote the package bits in '93 and probably started hating them pretty soon thereafter. :-) In some of those postings, I did at least lay out a lot of criteria for what a next-generation packaging system would need and also railed against the .tar.gz method of packaging and what a more successful storage model would need to have. I also did actually sort of deal with that latter problem about a year ago by contracting out the task of writing a zip file access library, the last version(s) of that work being sort of in Mike Smith's hands now since he foolishly volunteered to take over liason work on that project awhile back. Ask Mike if you want a copy. The ziplib stuff is only a very small part of it, however, and you still need to work out the details of the "trusted install script" mechanism so that packages can frob your system in fairly significant yet carefully controlled ways, and you need to get the "undo" functionality working so that packages can be backed out a little more successfully. :-) Then there's the whole "upgrade" scenario to worry about. That's FUN! :) It's a fair amount of work, but if you're game to do it them I'm certainly game to see you give it a try! :-) Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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