Specifications

Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Oracle Solaris Porting Guide

installation in order to refresh the system configuration. They can also specify actions such as creating

users and groups as part of the package installation process.

The package manifest can be divided into three different parts:

• Package metadata:

This section is conceptually similar to “tagged data (header)” in RPM packages. Similar to RPM

packages, this will have mandatory and optional elements. Here are the typical set of attributes

defined as part of package metada:

− pkg.fmri—package name and version

− variant.arch—the architectures that the package supports

− pkg.description—package description

− pkg.summary—package summary

− info.classification—a grouping scheme used by package manager

• Package contents:

This specifies what files, directories, and links will be installed as part of the package. Here you can

also specify things such as the directory on the destination system to which the files will get copied,

the user, the group ownership, the permissions, and son on.

• Package dependencies:

Here you can specify the list of files and packages that must be present on the system before

installing this package. Typically, dependency generation is composed of two separate steps: First,

determine the files on which this software depends. Next, determine the packages that contain the

required files. There are IPS commands to generate and validate the dependency information. IPS

allows you to specify various types of dependencies on packages:

− Require—If this type of dependency is specified, the dependent package or its higher versions

must be installed before this package can be installed.

− Optional—If this type of dependency is specified, the dependent package or its higher version is

installed if it is available.

− Conditional—This type of dependency is most often used to install optional extensions to a

package if the requisite base packages are present on the system.

− Group—Group dependency is used to create a group of packages.

− Origin—This dependency is used to resolve upgrade issues.

Packaging is a vast and intricate subject. In this chapter, we will restrict our scope to major

implementation differences between the two platforms to help in the migration from RHEL RPM to

Oracle Solaris 11 IPS.