[illumos-Developer] review: nuke staleness from svr4pkg

[Garrett D'Amore]

On Fri, 2010-10-15 at 12:03 +0200, Volker A. Brandt wrote:
> Hi Garrett!
> 
> 
> > http://mexico.purplecow.org/gdamore/webrev/presvr4/
> 
> I have not looked at this, and I agree with a) through f)
> except:
> 
> > c) custom hacks for *patches*.  We will never, ever, ever support
> > partial package patching on illumos.  In fact, the problems with it are
> > the most oft-cited reason by the IPS team for throwing away SVR4 and
> > inventing something new.
> 
> I am sure you are aware of the fact that this will prevent all
> third-party products (including Sun/Oracle products) from being
> patched on an Illumos-based distro, ever.
> 
> While I am all for cutting cruft and dead code, I think that such
> a step would needlessly remove much of the Solaris compatibility
> that Illumos has.  If I had voting rights in Illumos, I would give
> lots of -1's to that idea.

I think this is covered already.   "patchadd" and its ilk are closed
source, and basically are utter garbage anyway.  The "new" world order
of patching is not to do dim-sum style patching, but to simply reinstall
the whole package (pkgadd'able package).  Patching was based on "sparse"
packages, along with some *very* scary package scripting, and the source
of a great deal of headache.

In short, legacy patching is done. done. done.

	- Garrett