[csw-users] Why support Solaris 8 onwards?

[shuttlebox]

On 9/19/07, Ben Taylor <Ben.Taylor at sun.com> wrote:
> The bloat is the duplication of packages in blastwave that
> are in Solaris, especially as you move from 8 to 9 to 10 to
> 11 (nevada).

But Suns packages are often not the latest even at release and then
they will normally just get security fixes and no version upgrades
which bring new features. As you said, Solaris 10 is almost 3 years
old now and many want to use fresher versions of bash, perl, Gnome or
whatever.

It's up to the user/admin to remove Suns packages if the bloat is a
problem which it might be due to the extremely annoying patch process.
How would it be better for users if Blastwave didn't offer the
"bloat", if they roll their own packages or just compile it into /opt
or /usr/local they will still end up with bloat unless they remove the
obsolete versions which belong to Sun, not Blastwave? I think the
question is - who offers the bloat, Sun or Blastwave? To you, it's
Blastwave since they are installed later but to me it's Sun because
they bring what I don't want to/can't use.

If you rely heavily on Blastwave packages maybe you could install a
smaller cluster of Solaris to reduce the bloat from the start?

> Other instances is just the sheer number of packages required
> to get one package.  Because there is no master database of
> dependencies that can be querried remotely, a package has to
> be unrolled, have it's dependencies checked, and then stop and
> go get more to resolve dependencies.
>
> In a better version of blastwave, the check for dependencies
> would happen before downloading the first package.  In a standalone
> environment, the existing model could be used.

Well, at least Blastwave handles dependencies in an automatic fashion
instead of just barfing. ;-) I agree though, that it would be nice if
both pkg-get and the web site optionally could list ALL dependencies
for a package.

-- 
/peter