Monday Mar 09, 2009
Today, I am proud to announce the release of version 0.9 of the Solaris Package Companion. This new version is primary based upon a set of patches provided by Jerome Blanchet that provided support for the collection and processing of reverse dependency information ("R" entries in a package's depend(4)) file) as well as enhanced processing and display of platform specific packages. Thank you, Jerome!
As is my tradition when a bug is found, I try and publish a little something extra as a mea cupla. Due to limited "free time", the "mea culpa" enhancement this time is quite minor but worth mentioning anyway. In past versions, there was no interface to change the information collection rules of the tool. If you wanted to disable the collection of certain types of information (such as package names or dependencies) you had to go into the code and change the relevent COLLECT_ variable. No longer. The defaults are still the same, but now the tool will honor variable settings originating from the shell or command line as follows:
$ env COLLECT_NAMES=0 ./spc-v0.9.ksh -r /tmp/myrepository -i -l
Note that the COLLECT_ variables are only used during the creation of a repository. Not a big enhancement, but one none the less! Thank you again Jerome for discovering the bug and offering a patch!
Keep the suggestions, reports and fixes coming!
Glenn
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Monday Aug 04, 2008
On the heels of the v0.8 release, Clive
King was able to find a new bug introduced as a result of my attempting to make the code a little more in line with Korn Shell conventions. Clive, thank you for reporting the details! I have published an updated version as v0.8.1. As always, you can get all of the details at the OpenSolaris Solaris Package Companion Project Page
As is my tradition when a bug is found, I try and publish a little something extra as a mea cupla. This time is no different. In addition to version 0.8.1 of the Solaris Package Companion, I have also published a testing tool for the same.
The testing tool, called spc-test-v0.1.ksh is also available from the project page. This tool can test multiple versions of the tool against multiple repositories which is pretty cool when checking for regressions. There are currently 48 tests although tests can be easily added or removed as needed. It can optionally display the results to the screen, but by default it records them in a directory where a basic consistency check is performed to detect differences in output (for the same repository) resulting from the use of different versions of the tool. This is not intended to be an all encompassing test suite or even a piece of production code, but rather a basic sanity check to make sure the key functions are working as expected.
Thanks again, Clive!
Keep the suggestions, reports and fixes coming!
Glenn
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Friday Aug 01, 2008
Wow, has time passed since my last posting. I promise to do a quick update soon as a lot has been happening over the last six months! In the meantime, I wanted to tell you all about a new version of the Solaris Package Companion (version 0.8) that is now available.
For those not familiar with the tool, here is a brief overview:
The Solaris Package Companion is a small Korn shell script that allows you to ask
quite a number of interesting questions about the relationships between Solaris
metaclusters, clusters and packages as well as their respective dependencies. Very
often, answers to these kinds of questions are essential for the construction of
minimized systems as well as more generally for OS golden images.
The goal of the Solaris Package Companion, or SPC for short, is to do all of the
hard work so you don't have to. SPC will create a cache of important facts by mining
information from the various packaging files and directories to allow you to quickly
and easily obtain answers to a variety of questions such as:
* What clusters or packages are contained in a given metacluster?
* What packages are contained in a given cluster?
* What metacluster or cluster contains a given package?
* On what other packages does a given package or cluster depend?
* Which packages depend on a given package?
* … and so on…
New to this release is a tree view display method that allows you to list the contents of metaclusters and clusters in a more eye-friendly tree-view. Thanks to Fredrich Maney for contributing the idea and code! Here are a few examples from the project page showing what this looks like:
To see what packages are included in a cluster, just use the "-t" option:
$ ./spc-v0.8.ksh -v -r ./myrepository -t SUNWCssh
[C] SUNWCssh Secure Shell
[P] SUNWsshcu SSH Common, (Usr)
[P] SUNWsshdr SSH Server, (Root)
[P] SUNWsshdu SSH Server, (Usr)
[P] SUNWsshr SSH Client and utilities, (Root)
[P] SUNWsshu SSH Client and utilities, (Usr)
To see what packages and clusters are included in a metacluster, just use the "-T" option:
$ ./spc-v0.8.ksh -v -r ./myrepository -T SUNWCmreq | head -10
[M] SUNWCmreq Minimal Core System Support
[C] SUNWCfca Sun ISP Fibre Channel Device Drivers
[P] SUNWqlc Qlogic ISP 2200/2202 Fibre Channel Device Driver
[P] SUNWemlxs Emulex-Sun LightPulse Fibre Channel Adapter (FCA) driver (root)
[C] SUNWCfct Sun Fibre Channel Transport Software
[P] SUNWfcsm FCSM driver
[P] SUNWfctl Sun Fibre Channel Transport layer
[P] SUNWfcp Sun FCP SCSI Device Driver
[P] SUNWfcip Sun FCIP IP/ARP over FibreChannel Device Driver
[C] SUNWCfmd Fault Management Daemon and Utilities
[…]
I would also like to thank Peter Pickford for sharing a fix for a bug that resulted in the tool not properly recording all dependencies under certain circumstances. Thank you! While I was at it, I also took a little time to clean up the code a bit.
You can find more information, examples and the source code on the project page.
Keep the suggestions, reports and fixes coming!
Glenn
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Did you mean "mea culpa" (from Latin &qu...
You got it. Thanks for the catch. Fixed.