-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

On Thu, 17 Sep 1998, Matthias Drochner wrote:

>One more:
>The pkg system does not well if parts of the filesystem
>are shared among a number of machines.
>Somehow the different sorts of installed files:
>-shared, arch-independant
>-shared, arch-dependant and
>-individual
>must be accounted for separately, within the corresponding
>filesystem, to get this right.
>Otherwise, a diskless client will eg keep claiming that it
>doesn't have a compiler, even if I install one in the shared
>/usr from the server.
>This looks non-trivial...
>
>For a collection of optional add-ons this shortcoming
>might be acceptable. But for serious use (and users
>with many diskless clients _are_ serious) the amount
>of necessary manual fixing would quite outweight the
>benefits. (Which are little compared to a big tarball
>since the disk space is only needed once.)

Random thought:  (this is general to package installation, not specific
to system packages) would it help this sort of thing if you could,
either by an environment variable or a variable in a config file, pick
an alternate location for package registration stuff?  A path?

This way, you could add /usr/pkg/db/pkg (name hypothetical) as a
location for package registration on diskless clients, and they would
automagically pick up registration for packages which were installed
into their /usr/pkg on the server...

- -- 
				Jim Wise
				jwise@unicast.com

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPfreeware 5.0i for non-commercial use
Charset: noconv

iQEVAwUBNgGBnIkLDoBfn5jPAQEy7ggAxkB/HazHMOCi1g/FSYsY8BbJ0thb1uXP
Zg2dayMLARQY3MyMw6fpINP08s4juLrBt2RJV56Peep+T93O0kNHKxWhZ4xzXbKM
cF/Ibr7Q3jPdrY7eaxs6NeZpwIZ4c7cHiaim+UrCNH56WtQNnZoZFJ3X9IWuVD3P
gxTsgNV8sc7pYyOt0gCrKfmFGF4RX97iIGPes02i4N2VPB6vuG9TcjGL2fvgWpxH
4kez1S0oHV50aYxgW+G9fMK/DPsIRfkJYGo1xhgGHPzrlqKVkcCRiEyJvTWSCCZ5
zZPX1lUVHP8w6nlMh5U+vCBbuMQZrBjaZKQxXCV0H7VRDHLwJkoUFA==
=L0nu
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----