[OmniOS-discuss] combo storage/virtualization server

[Eric Sproul]

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 1:54 PM, Paul B. Henson <henson at acm.org> wrote:
> Overall, it struck me as overengineered and unnecessarily complicated.
> Unless I missed something, you have to spin up a networked package
> repository just to install a single package on one box locally, which just
> seems wrong.

Not true.  It supports local file-based repos as well.  In fact, the
thing that makes it a networked repo is a separate process
(pkg.depotd) that puts an HTTP interface in front of what is just an
file-based repo on the package server.  Making a repo is dead-simple
(1, maybe 2 commands).

I had some of the same reservations initially as you did, but I've
come to appreciate some of the design decisions after having lived
with it for more than a year.  In particular, the fact that it does
not enforce a specific build methodology, e.g. rpmbuild or debuild,
allows admins to build their software however they like and publish an
IPS package from the result.  On the sysop side, the fact that you can
do differential updates saves a ton of time (and bandwidth).

>
> Hopefully the less complicated use in OmniOS won't be as much trouble to
> deal with :). Given the relatively sparse availability of aftermarket
> packages with OmniOS, I was thinking I might try to get Joyent's pkgsrc
> system working on top of it, leaving IPS just for the base OS packages.

Someone on the #omnios channel was working on that-- I don't recall
who.  We have a decent amount of packages that we use internally for
our managed-services operation, but we keep the repo server in the
open: http://pkg.omniti.com/omniti-ms/

They're built the way we like them for our own operations, but
everything there is freely redistributable so feel free to use them.

Eric