RE: smf manifests in pkgsrc

["Paul B. Henson" <henson%acm.org@localhost>]

> From: Jonathan Perkin
> Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2015 2:12 AM
> 
> My point was that I'm happy for you to write a patch which allows you
> to have your naming scheme whilst retaining mine.

Ah, I see my misunderstanding - I thought you meant it would take massive
code changes just to get the FMRI I wanted, but what you actually meant was
it would take code changes for me to get what I wanted, and everyone else to
get what currently exists :).

> As for your postfix + syslog example, it isn't actually true that it
> won't work - postfix will work fine as system-log is currently defined
> as an optional dependency.  Yes this isn't technically correct, but we
> ship postfix and rsyslog from pkgsrc by default in our images, and it
> works fine.

Well, given it is an optional dependency, it won't result in a failure to
start. But it still results in bad dependencies. The postfix service wants
to optionally see svc:/system/system-log running. Your rsyslog service
presumably has an FMRI of svc:/pkgsrc/rsyslog? So SMF has no way of knowing
that the svc:/system/system-log postfix wants is provided by
svc:/pkgsrc/rsyslog. So isn't there a chance postfix will start before
rsyslog? I suppose if you consider possibly losing early log entries as
"fine", then you're good to go :). Or is there some other reason rsyslog
would start before postfix, or does it just happen to regardless of
dependencies out of luck?

It would be nice if SMF had some concept of generic services, like "mail
server", "system logger", "ntp client" etc that could be depended on. I had
assumed that's what instances were for, svc:/system/system-log is the
generic service offering system logging, and the various instances were
specific implementations of it.

> appropriate.  Ideally it would allow users to set FMRIs in mk.conf, so
> you could add something like this to your mk.conf:

That sounds like a reasonable approach. However, at this point, given it
seems no one else has been interested in it, and I only have about three
services I care to change, the simpler option is to just tweak my local
checkout when I build my packages. I don't use anyone else's binaries...

Thanks for the input and perspective though.