I've used both in production at a University; I use only SunFreeware now that I am back in a commercial site.
The advantage of CSW was the one-stop shopping, being able as you point out to install an entire functioning server with a few clicks. However, the downside was that at one point I got into trouble because the dependencies were so intertwined that I could not upgrade some packages without upgrading the base system, which in turn required that I upgrade other packages. Also, csw wanted to install an *alarming* number of packages to function. The very first time I tried CSW it was to install some viewer, xv or gv, and if I recall correctly I had to install ***62*** packages. Including stuff like LDAP that had nothing at *all* to do with what I was installing. It's been a while so forgive me if I get the details wrong, but I think the order of magnitude is correct. I don't feel comfortable recommending that we install CSW on our current servers because of that interdependency. The upside of SunFreeware for me has been the fine-grained control of what I installed, and the trust factor. SunFreeware has been a source of very stable packages for a very long time. I also got rather badly burned by whatever happened with the CSW/Blastwave split, because all of a sudden my repositories dropped off the face of the earth, but that was temporary. Still, it's nice to have a vendor-supported repository. And the SunFreeware stuff works better with the packages on the Solaris distribution, as the CSW software really really wants everything to be under /opt/csw - in particular, my recollection is that I couldn't get CSW software to integrate with a non-csw distribution version perl and apache. And finally the big advantage of having more than one package depot has been the choice. At one point I recall that I installed one version of SAMBA, wanted to find it compiled with different flags, and turned to the other repository and found what I needed. I think it is *always* good to have multiple choice! _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
