A question about bundling smart with our distribution

[Sriram Narayanan]

Hi:

We're considering using rpm5 as our package system, with smart as the frontend.

Moinak (CCd) had developed spkg as a stop gap arrangement till we
figured out what to do next. We find IPS infeasible in low-bandwidth
countries, and we wanted to move away from SVR4 to something that's
more widely known.

We have been apprehensive about package manager licensing ever since
Debian Legal disliked how Nexenta modified and used dpkg (even though
they wanted to conteibute back the source). Debian Legal's concerns
were about Nexenta's dpkg linking with a non-GPL libc. There is once
again a discussion thread about this on this month's Debian Legal
mailing list.

No one on the Belenix team is a lawyer, and we've all got day jobs
where we do something else.

So, we thought that the best thing to do is to simply ask on the smart
mailing list whether you are OK with us building, linking and
distributing smart code along with non-GPLd (yet opensource)
libraries.

-- Sriram

On 9/7/10, Anders F Björklund <afb at algonet.se> wrote:
> Sriram Narayanan wrote:
>> I'm one of the team members of the Belenix Distro (www.belenix.org).
>> We are presently using the SVR4 package format, and have wanted to
>> move to a more modern day package format.
>
> The .pkg and .7z formats are available too, if you need them...
> It was added after discussion with other OpenSolaris community:
>
> https://code.launchpad.net/~afb/smart/pkg
>
> There was also a branch with some generic Solaris fixes, like
> broken file locking and such as discovered by OSUnix/StormOS:
>
> https://code.launchpad.net/~afb/smart/solaris
>
> But I guess neither project went ahead with Smart at the time,
> and Belenix was developing a custom package manager I think ?
>
> So we only added basic Nexenta support, with --ignore-locks.
> If you want to help test/support real Solaris support, great!
>
>> We are very likely to use rpm5 as our package system :) We intend to
>> bundle both yum and smart, and will leave it to our users as to which
>> tool they'd like to use.
>>
>> Our question:
>> Would you be OK with us using the smart given that most of the system
>> libraries on our distro are CDDL licensed ?
>
>
> I'm not sure what you are asking here. Smart is freely available
> under the GPLv2+ license. It works fine with rpm5 as the backend.
>
> Currently Smart 1.4 is under finalizing, but the Solaris support
> could be merged in for the next release (Smart 1.5) perhaps... ?
>
> --anders
>
>

-- 
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Belenix: www.belenix.org