Ben Collins writes ... > You are missing the fact that the old package does not understand that > the new package possibly setup some things (configuration settings, > diversions, symlinks, removal of cruft, alternatives) that it cannot > recover from. You are missing the fact that it is not as simple as > replacing files.
HP-UX's Software Distributor (SD) package manager(starting with 11.0) supports the ability to roll back patches. It saves every file that the patch replaces in a "save" directory, which consumes lots of disk space. When you decide you're happy with the patch or you need the disk space back, which ever comes first :) , then you "commit" the patch and it removes the save dir and info in the package database. Adam Lazur writes ... > Relocatable packages so a user can do an individual package install into ~ > without being r00t (this may be possible now with some dpkg foo?). HP-UX's SD also supports relocatable packages. I think this was originally done for diskless support. It requires that people writing install scripts follow strict guidelines to ensure that their packages are indeed relocatable. Richard Atterer ... > Just one simple small thing for me, please: An installer that is smart > enough to realize that it is about to overflow the disc, so it deletes > any .deb files that have been downloaded and already installed. (This > bit me once while doing an install over PPP.) SD looks at packages and determines disk usage in each of the standard file system partitions that HP-UX ships with to make sure there is enough space to install. This doesn't handle the case where somebody makes /usr/foo a symlink to another partition but it does pretty well. You can override the disk space analysis if you know what you're doing. In the "Rambling apt-get ideas" thread, Vince Mulhollon writes ... > Use a apt-get client to remotely mess with another workstations packages. > Messing with only one workstation at a time is boring. How about multicast > to configure a hundred workstations instead, all at once? And then have a > proxying apt-getd server multicast out the .deb files to all the machines > at the same time? SD can do this and has ACLs too. Some other things about SD, - conforms to (and, IIRC, was used to define) the "IEEE POSIX 1387.2 Software Administration" standard. - has been ported to several commercial UNIX variants as well as MSWindows. - supports hierarchical packages with Bundle -> Product -> Fileset -> File levels. For example most packages have Foo-BIN, Foo-MAN, and Foo-DOC, or Foo-CLIENT, and Foo-SERVER fileset definitions. SD is pretty nice(as far as closed propriatary software goes), but it is pretty large and slow relative to dpkg/apt. If some of these features could be added to dpkg/apt without sacrificing performance/ease-of-use/supportability then that would be pretty cool. -- Matt Taggart [EMAIL PROTECTED]
