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.
--
Nicolas Mailhot