[vbox-dev] Patch to support installation on non-Sun/Oracle Solaris hosts

[Ramshankar]

>
> Hello Ram, thanks for looking at this :)
>
> For OmniOS, releases for the past few years have been named 151NNN, with the ever-increasing NNN (current stable 'lts' release is 014 and testing 'bloody' is 015). So the bloody release also seen in FMRI numbers is 151015.
>
> With OpenIndiana things are a bit more volatile since development concentrated only on Hipster, as the project team pursues large-scale rearchitecture of the distro construstion and for a couple of years they were not at a stable position to pinpoint a numbered release (but since they do provide up-to-date packages, there may now be more users of OI-Hipster than users of the latest OI 'dev'-release). Instead, they occasionally start with a new empty package repository so there is little irrelevant obsolete cruft for pkg(5) to reference and process. Current repo-based version is 2015.0, and IIRC the 1 in FMRI is reserved for unpredicted bumps and/or local user builds to override a central repo, and the next number is a build-farm build number(?).
>
> Regarding the second question - yes, the purpose is to facilitate installation of those modules (and also I provided a fallback to use touched files for a user to enforce those installations on systems that we can't pinpoint with sed). There are quite a few illumos distros out there, whose packaging I am not intimate with (suffice it to say there are also non-IPS and non-SVR4 distros among them, although the OS/Net sources are common and so likely they would also support loading of these modules).
>
> Thanks,
> Jim
> --
> Typos courtesy of K-9 Mail on my Samsung Android

Hi Jim,

This might seem like a silly question, but if the output of 'uname 
-something' differs for these distros, can't we just use that instead of 
parsing kernel package FMRIs?  After all, the whole point of parsing it 
is to provide accurate build/release based drivers but since all these 
Solaris variants are basically snv_151 level compatible it doesn't 
really matter we get accurate major/minor numbers.

It would also make the script a lot simpler and the code path would be 
quite separate.

Regards,
Ram.