Haecceity

I had my first introduction to the Sol10 installer today. Oh My. For anyone who has ever complained that Debian is hard to install, go try solaris and then come back. Dependency resolution? Sure, we can tell you what dependencies you’ve missed. Then you get to go hunt around the appallingly laid out tree of packages (subtrees with one package in, no indication of what subtree a requirement might be in) trying to find the thing. Then you hope you’ve not missed something else, otherwise, repeat ad infinitum. And the granularity of the thing is just dreadful. I’ve ended up with all kinds of crap installed that I’ll never use just because something else that I’ll never ever use, but is a required package, depends on it.

And Heaven forbid that you should wish to search for something in the package list.

I walked back into our office and the Solaris Admin I share an office with tells me about all this cool stuff you can do, that is utterly undocumented in the manual as far as I can tell, that would actually be a really useful default, like Live Upgrades.

And don’t get me started on the package system itself, especially not when you have to throw the abortion that is Blastwave into the mix. Tim Bray has also mentioned just how good the Debian/Ubuntu packaging system is in comparison, and wonders why Sun aren’t investing quality engineering time in making it work on Solaris.

In contrast, the Ubuntu installer’s approach of installing the bare minimum and letting the packaging system do the work post install feels to me like the perfect method for installing a server.