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October 14, 2003
Solaris Packages
Spent a large part of today trying to write up a package creation guide for Solaris. The idea is to take some software (OpenSSL in this case), build both 64 and 32 bit binaries and assemble the whole thing into a Solaris package for mass distribution. Piece of cake.
Now document the process so it can be followed by a new graduate. Then revise it so it can be read by a manager (Dilbert style).
Actually the libraries are easy because the 32 bit files go in the lib directory and the 64 bit ones go in the sparcv9 subdirectory. The executables are a little bit harder unless you happen to find out about isaexec (which lives in /usr/lib normally). This allows you to put the 32 bit executables in a sparcv7 subdirectory, the 64 bit files go in sparcv9 and you create hard links to isaexec with the same name as your executables.
The tricky part ended up being the script that creates the pkg file. In the end I had a script that will work in most cases by just setting the four config entries at the top of the file. For more advanced cases, the script contains lots of commented sections (e.g. to include init scripts, or files outside the normal package space).
Any Solaris geeks who want a copy of the script are welcome to it :-)
For the geeks who are still reading: what on earth happened to sparcv8? Was Sun only using odd numbers or did it reference some value between 32 and 64?
Posted by Ozguru at October 14, 2003 10:10 PM
