[csw-maintainers] CSWcswclassutils: it wants to write in /usr

[Philip Brown]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Sebastian Kayser <skayser at opencsw.org> wrote:
>
>
> Couldn't we simply ship pkgutil/pkg-get with a admin(4) file that
> suppresses CAS warnings and then call pkgadd with it per default?

I would guess you mean "suppress postinstall scripts" warnings.

pkg-get already ships with an OPTIONAL admin file to do just that.
However, sysadmins who care about security (or sysadmins who just want
to know very closely, what random install scripts mess with) tend to
not appreciate that sort of behaviour by default.




> Then we could have:
>
> - cswclassutils: Eventually move from /usr to /opt/csw/somewhere.
>  While not all been packages have been converted, maintain the
>  CAS twice for /usr and /opt/csw/somewhere.

I thought of this when I first proposed the class action script
approach, years ago now.
However... have you tested whether class action scripts WORK anywhere
other than /usr/sadm/blah, if they are not in the same package?
As far as I recall, they do not. They must be in either /usr/blah, or
in each individual package that uses it.


Thus, there are TWO major benefits to our existing classactions scripts:

1. user doesnt get prompted about routine boring stuff from a postinstall script

2. There is a COMMON utility across all our packages, deployed to a
SINGLE place.
This means that if we update a class action script, we update it ONE
time,and all packages get the benefit.
The alternative, would mean that, if we bundled class action scripts
individually in every package that used them... then every time we
find, "oh dear, there's a bug in [classactionscriptfoo]", we would
need to repackage and release EVERY PACKAGE that used it!!


Take a look at
http://www.opencsw.org/packages/cswclassutils

I would guestimate there are... 100?  packages that use cswclassutils now.




I will propose an alternative, that came to me today while pondering
this problem.
An alternative, would be for us to publish our own version of the SVR4
pkg utils.
This version would respect class action scripts elsewhere, such as
/opt/csw/[whereever].
We could then do the "dual publish" mechanism that you propose, and
which I am actually in favour of. If it actually WORKED :-}

Sadly, I myself do not have the time to do this. I imagine it would be
a considerable effort for someone to do this. Allegedly, the source is
out there somewhere... but you'd have to track it down and make it
useable.