Re: [Pkgutil-users] patch to support non-standard VERSION entries

[<ma...@pr...>]

>> The other issue I'm going to be looking into shortly is that of
>> supporting multiple versions of the same package.
>
> Usually you use different catalogs for this and then use overlays in  
> pkgutil.conf on all these, e.g.
> veritas41/
> veritas50/
> veritas51/

Yes that's feasible.  Managing lots of different repos is a bit of a headache though, don't you think, particularly the more software stacks you have to maintain?  Also, does it not make the command-line rather long?  Each time you run pkgutil you'd have to use the -t option to specify a different repo, e.g.

# pkgutil -t https://swrepo.mydomain.net/sw/current/veritas5.0 -i vcs
# pkgutil -t https://swrepo.mydomain.net/sw/current/veritas5.1 -i vcs

vs. doing it in a single repo with different catalogue names, e.g.

# pkgutil -i vcs50
# pkgutil -i vcs51

But two problems with this.  1 - can't auto-generate the catalogue name (re my earlier bldcat patch) if the catalogue name has to be unique.  2 - the catalogue file uses package names in the dependency list, which won't be unique, and should be modified to use something that will be unique (such as the package filename).  

We would need a radical fix to this, take a deep breath, here goes:

The catalogue name can no longer be a unique identifier.  The package filename must become the unique identifier.

Phew, radical stuff.  I think I need to lie down.

So then your instructions for sysadmins never change, the latest version of VCS available in the production repo is always installed by 'pkgutil -i vcs'.  But in addition, you might be able to type:

# pkgutil -i vcs -S 5.0MP3

for example, where our magic -S option (--select) tells pkgutil that you know there are multiple entries for the catalogue name 'vcs', the one you want is the one where the VERSION/REV string contains the text '5.0MP3'.

We could be more radical still.  Yes we could.  We could allow package filenames to contain directory names, so that we could organise our repo more logically.  So we could have your

veritas41/
veritas50/
veritas51/

subdirectories in the repo if we chose, and the catalogue filename would contain the subdirectory name as well.  One catalogue, multiple subdirectories.  The end-user is oblivious to the fact that when he says 'pkgutil -i vcs' that it is downloaded from a subdirectory.

How open is everyone to being radical with pkgutil? :-)

Best regards,
Mark Bannister.