Re: Making syspkgs and makefs play nice together

[Lloyd Parkes <lloyd%must-have-coffee.gen.nz@localhost>]

On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 14:54 +0200, Dieter Baron wrote:
>   I would suggest that the unprivileged mode of pkg_add (optionally)
> writes out the mtree specification itself.  pkg_add knows the
> ownership and permission the installed files should have,

I've looked at this already and it turns out that pkg_add doesn't have
this information available to it. It relies on pax for the bulk of its
work.

>   Alternatively, we could change the PLIST format to be an mtree
> specification.

I was think of this as well. It would have to be done carefully because
we don't want to have to rewrite every PLIST. 

It occurred to me that there are some synergies that we are missing at
the moment. If pkg_* used a pax API directly rather than by execing pax,
then we would have more control over the packages. We would be able to
more easily print out an mtree specification. We could also avoid the
need to expand the package into a working directory and the BUGS section
of pkg_create(1) would vanish in a puff of code. 

We could do the same thing with makefs. We could make makefs use a pkg
API directly so that it could construct a file system image directly
from the packages.

I'm not suggesting that anyone run off and do these right now, but they
might be something for a future GSoC.

Cheers,
Lloyd