[vbox-dev] IPS package

Thomas Gouverneur list at espix.net
Thu Apr 3 18:27:16 GMT 2014 

 

Well, obviously if you are searching for something which not require
any user interaction, this is not gonna work with IPS at any time, as
it's not even in what IPS is supposed to support. 

Although, I don't
think it's a reason to keep away all of the IPS users from having a good
virtualbox package available... 

Please review the README document I
put in the github repo and see if that would fit as a start. 

As an
tradeoff solution, I can also offer to host the VirtualBox package into
my current repository and make this repository a user-contributed one so
you shouldn't have to bother about supporting IPS while still having
this to offer to the user base -- I can also generate some p5m files
available for download; 

What do you think? 

--Thomas 

Le 2014-04-03
18:22, Ramshankar a écrit : 

> On 04/03/2014 11:17 AM, Ramshankar
wrote: 
> 
>> Hi Thomas,
>> 
>> Our requirements are very simple. The
upgrade, uninstallation and installation should:
>> 
>> 1. Not require
*any* extra commands to be run manually by the user.
>> 2. All drivers
should be loaded, active, upgraded without requiring reboots. After an
upgrade new drivers should be active and running VirtualBox VMs after an
upgrade should really use the new driver.
>> 
>> As long as the run-once
SMF script can be invoked without any manual commands by the user that
is great and a solution we can accept. If it -does- require manual
stuff, we already had such a thing working a while back with a script
which does the job (fixup partial install done by pkg(5)).
> 
> Sorry my
previous mail was incomplete. The last statement doesn't mean we're not
interested in coming up with a solution using your work (possibly). It's
just that it was the reason for us to not favour IPS back when we were
considering switching to IPS for our Solaris 11 packages.
> 
> Any work
in getting the required functionality or even working towards it is
potentially interesting for us!
> 
> Regards,
> Ram.
> 
>> Regards,
>>
Ram.
>> 
>> On 04/03/2014 12:33 AM, Thomas Gouverneur wrote: 
>> 
>>>
BTW, I just upgraded the documentation on github so it's more
descriptive, with example of running the script and also running an
upgrade: 
>>> 
>>> https://github.com/tgouverneur/VBox-SVR2IPS [1] 
>>>

>>> Let me know, 
>>> 
>>> --Thomas 
>>> 
>>> Le 2014-04-02 22:45,
Thomas Gouverneur a écrit : 
>>> 
>>>> Klaus, 
>>>> 
>>>> The current
script I've been working on is doing exactly what you describe. I'm
adding a run-once service into SMF. 
>>>> 
>>>> I also add an
/opt/VirtualBox/VERSION file with the package's version string inside
it. 
>>>> 
>>>> When run-once SMF service start, it checks this file
against its latests known version and if that doesn't match, a
postinstall + driver cleaning is ran. 
>>>> 
>>>> How can I work with
you guys to know what's potentially currently missing and how you'd like
it to be implemented? 
>>>> 
>>>> Also, what is your possibilities at
Oracle to make an IPS repository available? 
>>>> 
>>>> I'd really like
to get things moving in the good direction there, IPS is really an
improvement to me and I guess also to a lot of other virtualbox users.

>>>> 
>>>> If needed, we can have a call together to discuss this
further off-list... let me know. 
>>>> 
>>>> --Thomas 
>>>> 
>>>> Le
2014-04-02 17:52, Klaus Espenlaub a écrit : 
>>>> 
>>>>> Hi
Thomas,
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 02.04.2014 14:45, Thomas Gouverneur wrote:
>>>>>

>>>>>> Ram, As far as I'm aware, there's no way to automatise it,
although I find it better than nothing to benefit from the IPS packaging
rather than the SVR one. On another side, we can still display a big fat
warning when the user is trying to install/upgrade with the instructions
to get this done the proper way.
>>>>> 
>>>>> If I'm not completely
behind this isn't possible with IPS, as one of its 
>>>>> design
decisions was that a package install/upgrade/uninstall cannot 
>>>>>
ever block to ask for input or provide any output besides requesting a

>>>>> reboot. I don't think anyone seriously considers reboots to be an
option 
>>>>> (it's a problem, not a solution).
>>>>> 
>>>>> To reach a
good usability a VirtualBox IPS needs to be able to reliably 
>>>>>
trigger some activity for ALL of the following situations: 
>>>>>
postinstall/postupgrade/postuninstall (and it'd be nice to have 
>>>>>
preinstall/preupgrade/preuninistall for doing some truly vital 
>>>>>
cleanups). Would it be possible to use a variable component in the SMF

>>>>> run-once service name like the package version to trigger
activities for 
>>>>> upgrades (only necessary for the case of upgrading
a live system)? 
>>>>> Anything automatable in a build process is fine
with us. Trust me, we're 
>>>>> not afraid of complex implementations
:)
>>>>> 
>>>>> If these activities aren't possible then the only way
would be to detect 
>>>>> a driver/application version mismatch when
some VirtualBox application 
>>>>> is started, and this is where we get
into the very bad user experience 
>>>>> region: this is generally done
by non-root users, who don't have the 
>>>>> privileges to rectify the
problem and have to ask the admin to complete 
>>>>> the manual part of
the upgrade.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I briefly thought about doing a "dummy IPS"
package, i.e. one which 
>>>>> simply dumps the PKG file into some
location, and use the run-once 
>>>>> service to do the PKG install, but
honestly this is several orders of 
>>>>> magnitude too ugly to be
acceptable.
>>>>> 
>>>>>> What do you think? Could this be
integrated?
>>>>> 
>>>>> We're not against IPS packaging, we'd be gladly
providing IPS packages 
>>>>> tailored for Solaris 11 ourselves if only
there would be a good solution 
>>>>> in sight which is user friendly.
So far we couldn't find any way to 
>>>>> create an IPS package with an
acceptable user experience, and that's why 
>>>>> we stick to the PKG
stuff which has the necessary hooks.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The IPS package has
quite some potential (directly installing the 
>>>>> package as part of
autoinstall, skipping the useless 32 bit binaries, 
>>>>> skipping
irrelevant drivers like the streams based bridging support, 
>>>>> i.e.
reducing the package size significantly)...
>>>>> 
>>>>> Klaus
>>>>

>>>> -- 
>>>> --Thomas
>>>> 
>>>>
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list
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>>>>
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>>> 
>>> --

>>> --Thomas
>>> 
>>>
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>> 
>>
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-- 
--Thomas



Links:
------
[1] https://github.com/tgouverneur/VBox-SVR2IPS
[2]
http://mdma.igh.cnrs.fr/vbox/en/catalog.shtml?show_all_versions=1&action=Refresh
[3]
https://www.virtualbox.org/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev
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