[csw-users] Blastwave and SFE

[Pete Ehlke]

On Sun Aug 12, 2007 at 16:27:39 +1200, Jonathan Wheeler wrote:
>
>> Coming from a strong debian background, the most convenient tool one had
>> at his disposal was apt-get. Installing and updating packages that lived
>> on remote servers was just something every linux user would expect be
>> available.
>> 
>> Its hard for me to comprehend how this is not available with something
>> so mature as solaris.
>You're not alone. To be clear though, this is more a SUN problem, then a
>BW one. Without BW, the situation would be magnitudes worse, so it's
>good to see that we've been making a real difference here.
>
Many people seem to be unaware of this, from pkgadd(1M):

 -d datastream pkgname,... | all

         Install or copy a package from device. device can be any
         of the following:


           o  A full path name to a directory or the  identifiers
              for  tape,  floppy  disk,  or  removable  disk (for
              example, /var/tmp or /floppy/floppy_name).

           o  A device alias (for example, /floppy/floppy0).

           o  A datastream created by pkgtrans (see pkgtrans(1)).

           o  A URL pointing to a datastream created by pkgtrans.
              The supported Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs)
              are http: and https:.

I don't recall any more when that first appeared, but it's been a very
long time now that pkgadd has been able to install from remote servers.

True that you have to put together your own package server, and build
your own order files ( since pkgadd doesn't chase dependencies ), but
I've been installing packages from remote servers for years.

It's unclear to me just now- after a couple of years using csw- whether
it's more hassle maintaining a package server and order files, or
dealing with the lack of coherent csw releases. Few things are more
annoying than pkg-get wanting to upgrade the world because someone made
a pm_* package depend on a specific rev of CSWcommon.

-Pete