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With a heterogeneous environment, package installation requires
an understanding of each of the package management systems. This
presented a problem with the 2.0 and 2.1 releases for certain
platforms, in particular Solaris and Tru64 UNIX. Unlike HP-UX depot
and IRIX inst, Solaris pkgadd and Tru64 UNIX setld handle installation
of dependencies poorly. The Solaris package manager does not
"automatically" install a package's dependencies and our Tru64 UNIX
setld packages do not ship with dependency information intact because
of the poor support in setld for dependencies.
Our solution to this problem is pkgutils, a
suite of tools that provides transparent access to the underlying
package management system. The most important of these is the
pkg-inst tool, a utility that installs packages
independent of the package management system. Support is available for
the following package management systems: AIX lpp, IRIX inst, HP-UX
depot, RPM, Solaris pkgadd, and Tru64 UNIX setld. The
pkg-inst tool works by reading an XML database
containing information about a package and its dependencies to
abstract from the user the details needed to install packages. Options
such as --ignoredeps and --reinstall provide access to
the specific options required by the package managers to achieve the
same end result on all package management systems. If a package being
installed has dependencies, pkg-inst will
automatically install the dependencies and then attempt to reinstall
the package once the dependencies have been installed.
The pkgutils also includes the following
tools:
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chk-pkg-updates: |
Check for new releases relative to what is
installed |
| pkg-config |
Install and remove links to common bin, info,
and man directories after installation of a package |
| pkg-info |
List installed packages, packages from a
repository, package information, and what packages have common links
associated with them |
| pkg-rm |
Removes packages installed with the
pkg-inst tool, regardless of the package management
system being used |
A sample run of pkg-inst is available for AIX
lpp, HP-UX depot, IRIX inst, RPM, Solaris pkgadd, and Tru64 UNIX setld.
Source:
ftp://ftp.thewrittenword.com/pub/pkgutils
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