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List:       opensolaris-companion-discuss
Subject:    [companion-discuss] Re:  Package registry for freeware (FOSS),
From:       "Richard L. Hamilton" <rlhamil () smart ! net>
Date:       2006-12-23 9:33:15
Message-ID: 9142957.1166895225297.JavaMail.Twebapp () oss-app1
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As good as this could be to have, it could get...interesting.  What about dependencies,
duplicates, etc?  For instance, Blastwave (for quite understandable reasons) tends to have
their own versions of almost anything that wasn't in Solaris 8 and later (not counting the
Companion CD), and have any dependencies on those rather than on whatever equivalents
there may be in the Companion CD or later versions of Solaris.  That decouples their
update cycle (which usually means they can stay more current, which in turn means they
may well lead the way in terms of getting problems solved building particular software on
Solaris), and allows them to more often use the same packages for Solaris 8 and later
versions of Solaris.  And, until some rumored increased cooperation between sunfreeware.com
and blastwave.org materializes, there's also the issue of where they install: /opt/csw being
peculiar to blastwave.org, and /usr/local (sunfreeware.com) being very much deprecated for
Solaris (and any SVR4).

So while having a single place to look for pre-built freeware would be fantastic, it needs to
either include sufficient information to address these issues, or needs to at least include
a disclaimer that points them out and indicates that the resolution is up to the end user.
And longer-term, solutions that provide better uniformity, less duplicates, and sharing
of build information are needed, so that both tighter integration and staying current can be
achieved.

Whatever is done now doesn't have to solve all (or perhaps even any) of those, but I think that
once it actually comes down to a programmatically accessible registry, it should very much be
extensible so that it could be maximally useful later as all the pieces come into place, should
incorporate something like a version number for the format (as well as a date stamp or the
like for the contents), and should lend itself to extending in the direction of future integration
with pkg* tools, as well as with something that ultimately  provides for going from source
and build information to binary packages (similar to *BSD ports/packages or Linux rpm).
And it should be easy to generate a web page from it, for visibility of the range of packages
available, as well as for easy access or more detailed information.
--
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