From: ruhtra@turing.toronto.edu (Arthur Tateishi) Subject: Re: A discipline for packages Date: 1 Jan 1993 00:07:01 GMT
In article <1992Dec31.022954.5807@sol.UVic.CA> pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald) writes:
>In article <T8BmwB1w165w@kf8nh.wariat.org> kf8nh@kf8nh.wariat.org (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
>>marcf@nexus.yorku.ca (Marc G Fournier) writes:
>>> nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson) writes:
>>> >You know something I've always hated about Unix (and people are
>...
>>If, in my copious spare time [ ;-) ] I can manage to put together an
>>install/uninstall/update package that works that way, I'll be glad to donate
>>it to Peter so SLS will have a better install/uninstall package than the
>
>Actually I responded via email to Neslon's initial suggestion. The
>gist of it is there is no benefit to the symbolic links idea.
>SLS already allows easy uninstall (not that anyone uses it)
>via "sysinstall -remove pkg".
I DID! I DID! (I nuked emacs before even continuing with the x? disks :-)
<Remember, this isn't comp.editors. I just didn't want it
taking up space on my disk.> )
>Symbolic links turn out to be a system admins nightmare, and I am thinking
>seriously about clensing SLS of all such, except for directories.
>While hardware is cheap, slowing it down makes no sense.
I Agree
At first glance, I thought SLS _WAS_ just untarring a bunch of files,
etc. But on closer inspection, each package has mechanisms for
installation, removal, AND EXTRACTION, not to mention things like
having scripts be able to compress/uncompress man pages and fonts
after/before installation/extraction. If you simply keep a list of
personally installed packages and use sysinstall -extract <package> and
stash these away before upgrading all would be fine.
The other thing I really like about the sysinstall way of doing things
is being able to go into a directory, see what packages I've got, and
be able to quickly see where things got installed.
The original poster wanted something to manage wholesale upgrades of
SLS. Simply having a simple way to install and remove packages doesn't
cut it. If you follow the SLS package paradigm when installing local
things, you can easily extract them to a separate fs before upgrading
and re-install afterwards. If they install by typing "make install" you
should either setup your own directories and symlinks or make a quick
SLS package install/remove/extract script.
Peter, keep up the good work. As the fellow who dealt with 386BSD before
SLS Linux said, "386BSD could really use this technology."
arthur
--
"The first fact to face is that UNIX was not developed with security, in any
reliable sense, in mind; this fact alone guarantees a vast number of holes."
-- "On the Security of UNIX", Dennis M. Ritchie
Arthur Tateishi ruhtra@turing.utoronto.ca