[csw-maintainers] the future of pkg-get...

[Ben Walton]

Hi All,

We noticed the following tweet in the irc ceeswi feed today and it
started a discussion about what to do with pkg-get:

--snip--
opencsw at twitter: Solaris joys. I'd forgotten than OpenCSW can screw
itself in the middle of an upgrade by removing wget/ssl.  Guess how I
was reminded :(
--snip--

As this is a problem that would affect pkg-get, but not pkgutil due to
the operations ordering, we started discussing options.  Some of the
options are:


1. Provide a new pkg_get package that bails with a 'Please install
   pkgutil' message unless the arguments are '-i pkgutil'
2. Provide a new pkg_get package that bails in every case with a
   'Please install pkgutil' message.
3. Have pkgutil provide pkg_get_stub/CSWpkgget thus obsoleting pkg_get
   in favour of pkgutil.
4. Leave it as is.

My preference would be either 1 or 2 as I think that people hitting
issues like those in the tweet do more harm than good to OpenCSW's
reputation.  Both of these options could be implemented with a wrapper
around pkg-get.real to allow a determined site to continue using
pkg-get if they want.

The third option, while superficially attractive, would leave people
without anything responding to pkg-get and shouldn't be considered
seriously in my opinion.  (I guess CSWpkgutil could provide a
replacement for pkg-get...implementing option 1 or 2, but I still
don't think this is the best path.)

The fourth option is status quo and harmful to users in the long run,
in my opinion.

What do you folks think?  Are there other better options?

Thanks
-Ben
--
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
C:416.407.5610 | W:416.978.4302