Alan Hargreaves' Weblog
The ramblings of an Australian SaND TSC* Principal Field Technologist
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Friday May 22, 2009
Installing "extra" packages against OpenSolaris 2008.11 (with or without support repository updates)
It took me a bit to work out what was going on here (including a number of re-installs to make sure I hadn't screwed up), so I thought it worth sharing.
First, what a failure looks like:
After following Chris's instructions for adding the extra repository, I tried to install flash from it so the kids could play their browser based flash games.
$ pfexec pkg install pkg://extra/web/firefox/plugin/flash
Creating Plan |
pkg: the following package(s) violated constraints:
Package pkg:/SUNWcsl@0.5.11,5.11-0.111 conflicts with constraint in installed pkg:/entire:
Pkg SUNWcsl: Optional min_version: 0.5.11,5.11-0.101 max version: 0.5.11,5.11-0.101 defined by: pkg:/entire
It turns out that what is at issue here is that the extra repository now has the "fat" packages that we will be using for 2009.06. The pkg command on 2008.11 (with any number of support repository updates - I was originally on SRU4 before re-install) can't handle these so it produces that cryptic message.
So, what can we do about it?
The first step is to have a look at all versions of the package we are interested in on extra.
$ pfexec pkg list -af 'pkg://extra/web/firefox/plugin/flash' NAME (AUTHORITY) VERSION STATE UFIX web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra) 10.0.22.87-0.111 known ---- web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra) 10.0.22.87-0.101 known u--- web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra) 9.0.151-0.101 known u--- web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra) 9.0.125-0.101 known u--- web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra) 9.0.125-0.101 known u---
The version 9 packages will work ok, so we simply install one of those:
$ pfexec pkg install "pkg://extra/web/firefox/plugin/flash@9.0.151-0.101" PHASE ITEMS Indexing Packages 554/554 DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) Completed 1/1 3/3 2.46/2.46 PHASE ACTIONS Install Phase 19/19 Reading Existing Index 9/9 Indexing Packages 1/1
And done. The note to myself for 2009.06 is that that 4gb root disc is just not going to cut it anymore :) Time for something more reasonable.
Posted at 03:41PM May 22, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in OpenSolaris | Comments[3]
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Thanks for bringing this up. This seems to be an issue which could cause confusion in the future. There are two OS repositories, dev and release where dev runs ahead of release. There are also repositories (like extra) which supply additional packages. Users of the release repository can get nags from the update manager about a new package version which they can't use because it is only valid on the dev release. In this case, the build 111 based flash is flagged as an update but "release" repository users can't install it because they're still at build 101.
For these additional repositories it would be nice if the update manager didn't bug "release" users to upgrade to packages which they can't use. If "release" repository systems could assert that they aren't interested in packages dependent upon builds newer than the current "release" build, the upgrade manager could do the right thing and not flag incompatible updates.
Posted by Rand Huntzinger on May 23, 2009 at 12:41 AM EST #
Alan, you may be able to trim some disk space usage by dumping the contents of /var/pkg/download (that's just a download cache in you case need to reinstall or an install or update operation gets aborted before it completes so you don't have start all over again).
Don't forget you'll have to delete any old zfs snapshots you have as well to see the savings.
Posted by Shawn Walker on May 23, 2009 at 11:33 AM EST #
Before I forget, Bart Smaalders is working on a SAT solver which will allow us to "backtrack" when the user asks to request software and we can't do it because of package constraints like the one you showed here.
When that gets implemented, it should do what you had to do manually here, automatically.
Posted by Shawn Walker on May 23, 2009 at 11:35 AM EST #