On 24.03.2017 13:34, nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net wrote:
Why would Solaris switch to rpm, when they already had SysV packages at the time, which are pretty much equivalent in functionality?
Solaris at the time had degenerated into a barebones system, they needed to find a way to import all the stuff packaged by Linux distros of repackage thousands of components themselves. To give you an idea how deep they had dug themselves before IPS, their main shell was ksh, and they hadn't managed to migrate completely from ksh 88 to 93 yet.
Before they closed the doors again some of the IPS stuff was available in public repos, complete with forks of Fedora specs (with the original Fedora comments) and the added IPS enhancements such as facets.
so your argument is that Solaris created IPS because they wanted to steal a rpm of ksh93?
the people doing the work claimed that the reason it wasn't done earlier is a long list of compatibility breakages in ksh93:
http://markmail.org/message/m7jkcvb6tm5ffktb
but why didn't they import all of those rpm specs as SysV packages? that ought to be much easier, given how much closer rpm is to SysV than to IPS... the latter doesn't even have pre/postinst scripts!