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List:       crux
Subject:    Suggestion: Package Clusters
From:       Markus Ackermann <maol () symlink ! ch>
Date:       2002-01-04 16:20:46
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At work we're using package clusters for easier installation of packages
which depend on each other or just belong to each other. We've written an
entire set of clusteradd and clusterrm tools to handle them (on Solaris).

I've been building a Gnome distribution, Daniel has made KDE packages
available for Crux, and there are other things like nessus or mplayer which
might only make sense when installed together with other packages.

I think Crux should feature some cluster handling mechanism, albeit very
simple.

My suggestion (waiting for your ideas...) is (I'm using the Gnome example)
that there be a cluster directory among the package directories, i.e.
"GNOME" (at work we usually name our clusters all uppercase), and in this
dir were all the necessary info to install all packages required by the
cluster.
I see two possibilities how the actual installation of a cluster will work,
depending on how much Per supports the idea.

No. 1: there will be clusteradd/clusterrm (or pkgadd -c/pkgrm -c) and a
GNOME/cluster.def file where the required packages and their versions are
defined. clusteradd would handle all checking if a package is already
installed, if it has the right version, etc...

No. 2: that's easy, just a script (shell, perl, whatever) which calls pkgadd
for all the necessary packages. Writing the script is left to the cluster
maintainer.

Once there will be ports the cluster mechanism might work a bit differently
because a Makefile with all necessary ports will be enough. But still we'd
have to agree if having packages that function as cluster are allowed, i.e.
packages which don't include any software/sources but require lots of other
packages to be installed.

Please let me know what you think about it. I think we could live with a
simple version (#2) and create real cluster packages when we have ports.

For the time being I might write a simple script for Gnome which
a) downloads all necessary packages from CCP and contrib
b) checks if they're installed
c) installs or upgrades them.

Since we don't have dependencies in our packages we don't have to care about
the order of installation, but some apps (like galeon) might not run if not
all of the necessary libs are on the system, or if wrong versions are
installed (e.g. gdk-pixbuf, Per's package has version 0.11.0, but gnome's
control-center requires a later version because some libs/headers in
gdk-pixbuf have dramatically changed. I have packaged 0.14.0 now).

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