Re: Glad to see interest in install/packaging

[Drazen Kacar <dave arsdigita com>]

Kevin Breit wrote:
> On Sunday 29 April 2001 05:34 pm, Drazen Kacar wrote:

> > I'm not sure if /opt is a good place, though.
> Actually, I install all my "duplicate-version" stuff into /opt and it tends 
> to work very well.  Why do you think it's not too hot of a place to prefix?

Because of some obscure reasons. Solaris treats /opt as one of the OS
partitions (if it's on a separate partition). So OS upgrade will mess
with it. If you have a machine with small disks, you don't get "upgrade"
option, but only "fresh install"[1]. And fresh install will delete anything
you had on /opt.

Then there is a small problem with applications being served from NFS
server. If you have machines with different OS releases you can't mount
the whole /opt, just because it contains some files which belong to a
particular OS release. So you'd have to mount all subdirectories instead.
This is doable, but it's messy.

Basically, I don't like the fact that /opt on Solaris is used for OS files
and for 3rd party software. Those should be separated[2].

Then there is a general NFS problem, which has nothing to do with a
specific mount point. If the applications are in /opt/gnome, then their
configuration files would probably be in /opt/gnome/etc. This means that
all hosts which mount /opt/gnome would have to use /opt/gnome/etc files
which reside on the server, ie. it's impossible to make local adjustments.

The solution to this problem is supposed to be configuring all
applications to use /etc/opt/gnome directory for their config files.
But there are some problems with this:
a) it's not enough to just mount /opt/gnome, because you also have
   to install default config files in /etc/opt/gnome.
b) in case of software upgrade on the server, clients might need
   config file upgrade/adjustment/whatever. This is not trivial at all.

The real solution would be for the application software to check one
more location for the config files. If the prefix is /opt/blah, then
first check /etc/opt/blah. If the config file is not found there, then
check /opt/blah/etc. That way clients inherit all config files from the
server, but they can modify them, if they want. However, I don't know of a
single application that behaves in this way.


[1] I never bothered to find out the exact conditions in which /opt doesn't
    survive OS upgrade. But it can happen.

[2] Except for software which depends on OS release.

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