From: pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald) Subject: Re: A discipline for packages Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 21:25:11 GMT
In article <1993Jan1.201620.26986@nwnexus.WA.COM> vince@halcyon.com (Vince Skahan) writes:
>pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald) writes:
>>SLS already allows easy uninstall (not that anyone uses it)
>>via "sysinstall -remove pkg".
>
>peter...don't take it out...I use it a lot !!!!!
>
>>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.
>
>there are a number of packages (smail3.1.28 to name one) that use several
>symbolic links. There are other packages (nn6.4.18 to name another) that
>hard-link. I'm sure they both have their reasons...I'd recommend not messing
>with how the authors of a piece of software make it do its magic.
Actually, I was thinking of replacing them with hard links. But for now,
I will probably just refrain from adding symlinks to the packages I
put together.
>
>now if you can figure out how to have a package ask a few questions and
>'do good' as part of the installation process, I'm all ears...there are
>some packages that need to know things in order to be plug-n-play in a
>binary-only distribution like SLS>
>
It turns out that my approach for this is to unpack ambiguous components
into a temporary directory and then run the /install/doinst.sh script
to ask any questions, or do any magic and mv things into their final
berth. For example, binaries could unpack into /usr/bin/tmp, and
that way there is some hope of being on the same file system for mv.
>--
> ------------------- Vince Skahan ------ vince@halcyon.com ----------------
> ... to list Waffle files available from the mail server at halcyon.com,
> send mail to 'fileserv@halcyon.com' with the text 'index' ...