Re: [Pkgutil-users] pkgutil package install/available mismatch

[Rob R. <rr...@fa...>]

Here's a scenario:

I have 10 packages in my puppet manifest I need to make sure are installed.

Each time puppet runs on the client server, it uses pkgutil -c <pkg
name> to check if that particular package is still installed. It runs
this command for each package which results in overall slower
performance for puppet opposed to using pkg-get for the package provider.

Rob Ruma
Harvard University
Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS)
UNIX IT Systems

Peter Bonivart wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 4:50 AM, Rob Ruma <rr...@fa...> wrote:
>> Hi Peter,
>>        After doing more testing with pkgutil as a package provider for puppet,
>> I've discovered that using the true package name to call packages works
>> just fine. Although, I have noticed that manifests referencing many
>> packages does take considerably longer to process compared to pkg-get.
> 
> Do you mean when there are many dependencies?
> 
> When pkg-get installs it doesn't check dependencies at all, it just
> downloads the requested package, unpacks it and then check if there
> are dependencies to add, this repeats recursively.
> 
> It's of course faster not to do something than doing it but normally
> download and install is like 90-99% of the time spent.
> 
> I just tried with Firefox on a 10 year old Sparc and it calculated the
> dependencies in 2 seconds. Gnome, however, took 2 minutes. On a
> relatively modern x86 server it took 1s and 30s respectively.
>