[OmniOS-discuss] Internal pkg error during a test r151010 to r151014 upgrade

[Chris Siebenmann]

> Short story is that /opt is part of a namespace managed by the Solaris
> packaging and as such is part of a BE fs tree. If you have privately
> managed packages under certain subdirs, turn those sub-dirs into
> separate datasets instead.

 If this is the case for OmniOS, I believe that it should be strongly
and visibly documented in the OmniOS wiki as part of the install
instructions and so on. It is not intuitive to me at all, and in fact
I would strongly expect that it would not be the case as /opt is where
people have traditionally put *third party* software.

 We explicitly made /opt a separate ZFS filesystem because we did not
want the various parts of /opt that we add (through various mechanisms)
to be captured in the boot environment and thus to chew up space (as
changes in third-party packages in /opt are normally totally decoupled
from changes in the boot environment). As far as making subtrees of /opt
into their own ZFS filesystems: this is something that doesn't scale
at an administrative level. It's quite possible to have any number of
subdirectories in /opt (one per vendor, one per relatively separate
package, etc etc). Having to carefully make each of these a separate ZFS
filesystem is a lot of work, and then of course you have to carefully
*not* make the ones that are part of the core system into separate ZFS
filesystems because then they'll blow up on package upgrades.

(So how do you know which /opt package directories are safe to make into
separate filesystems so they won't be incorporated into your BEs when
you don't want them to be? Good question! I have no idea. Documentation
on this would be good too.)

 Overall, I very strongly believe that either /opt needs to be safe as a
whole or it needs to be entirely off limits. In that /opt has been 'put
your stuff here freely', I believe that it is a serious mistake to claim
it arbitrarily for the operating system (which is what saying '/opt and
random sub-parts of it must be in the BE' amounts to).

	- cks