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- Path: sparky!uunet!utcsri!turing.toronto.edu!ruhtra
- Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
- From: ruhtra@turing.toronto.edu (Arthur Tateishi)
- Subject: Re: A discipline for packages
- Message-ID: <1992Dec31.190701.26910@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
- Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto
- References: <marcf.725692346@yorku.ca> <T8BmwB1w165w@kf8nh.wariat.org> <1992Dec31.022954.5807@sol.UVic.CA>
- Date: 1 Jan 93 00:07:01 GMT
- Lines: 52
-
- 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
-