In November 2011, we’ve announced a new catalog layout. For some users, the choice of the catalog might be unclear; “should I use the testing, or the unstable catalog?” (The stable catalog is dead.)

The short answer is: it’s best if you use both testing and unstable.

Let’s consider the alternative: using only one catalog on all machines. If you use unstable (also in production), you’ll keep getting a lot of updates, and chances are that some of them will be broken. On the other hand, if you use only the testing catalog, there will be less churn, but you won’t spot problems in packages while they’re in unstable and you will increase chances of a bad package push to testing.

If you run a site where you have production and development / testing machines, you can use the unstable catalog for the ones that have higher instability tolerance. If anything breaks in unstable, you’ll notice the problem but it won’t be an operational issue for you. If you get back to us with a report, we’ll fix the it, and the bug won’t make it into the testing catalog.

I was recently alerted to a useful resource for the Solaris Community that is worth sharing.  The wesunsolve.net site aims to fill a gap left by the Oracle takeover of Sun.  You can find all kinds of useful information about available patches, both bug and security, as well as patch clusters for the various versions of Solaris.  In the future, we’ll collect such useful resources in a Friends section of this site, but until that’s ready, this will hopefully direct more people to a great site.

This question seems rather trivial – just use pkginfo and be done with it. However, this gives you the complete list of installed CSW packages. Sometimes I come to a machine where another admin installed some CSW packages which pulled in a lot of dependencies. When trying to find out what the initial cause for installation was I wrote this tiny script that prints the minimal set of CSW packages needed to be installed to result in the current set of CSW packages installed. No magic in there, but sometimes these little helpers come in handy

#!/opt/csw/bin/perl

my @allpkgs = grep { /^CSW/ }
              map { (split( /\s+/ ))[1] }
              `/usr/bin/pkginfo`;
my %minimal;
$minimal{$_} = 1 foreach (@allpkgs);

# Remove dependencies
foreach (@allpkgs) {
  open D, "/var/sadm/pkg/$_/install/depend" or next;
  while( <D> ) {
    my ($type, $pkg) = split( /\s+/ );
    next if( $type ne "P" );
    delete $minimal{$pkg};
  }
  close D;
}
print "$_\n" foreach (keys %minimal);

At long last, we are starting to refresh our GNOME libraries, and eventually, top level GNOME programs as well.
We hope to publish a modern “gedit” very soon. (in a few days)

We could very much use additional volunteers, either as packagers, or just volunteering to test packages before official release. Please let us know, either by contacting your favourite maintainer, or posting on the users list, or using the maintainer signup page.

A new mirror is available since beginning of March ’09. It is located in France. Marseille area, and is hosted by a French university.

The mirror URL is http://opencsw.solaris-fr.org (rsync and ftp are not available yet).

Many thanks to Gerard Henry!