Known problems

There are a number of known problems within this software. Whilst they are detailed in the BUGS section of the manuals for all of the commands, they are also summarised by command below.

• build-pkg
• chroot-install
• check-pkg
• proj-template
• simple-proj

build-pkg

• If you specify a package name prefix (i.e. PkgPrefix in the $HOME/.build-pkg file) then you can not remove this prefix when specifying the package name unless you specify the package name directly with the -p option
• We do not support classes within packages

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chroot-install

• There are issues with the use of this program with NFS mounted directories. Since the majority of the work performed by this program is done as the root user the default options for NFS serving will break this program. By default the root user (i.e. UID 0) has the same privilages the nobody user (actually takes the UID of the nobody user) when accessing an NFS mounted directory unless the NFS server has been configured not to do this.

  As a result of this it is recommended that this program is not used on a directory which is mounted via NFS unless the NFS server has been configured to give the root user the privilages of the root user on the NFS server.

• You need to have the system version of perl (installed in /usr/perl5 on Solaris 8) available.

• It is not possible to provide software from within the area being installed into by loopback mount. For example, the installation process of some software requires the command some-prog which has been installed under the /usr/local/ tree. Now, if the software in question is also to be installed under the /usr/local/ tree we have a problem. It is not possible to just loopback mount the /usr/local/ directory as this would make the directory tree you are attempting to install under read-only and thus prevent the installation of the package from occuring. It may also not be sensible to copy all of the /usr/local/ tree into the chroot() environment; on most systems this would add a large amount of time to the package building process.

  The only real solution is a kludge; you avoid the use of chroot-install by having the software package install in the InstallPackage/build directory as described in the manual page for build-pkg For example with software which uses GNU autoconf this could mean doing the following:

  make prefix=`pwd`/InstallPackage/build/usr/local install
  

  However this also means that you have to check the Makefile of the software to ensure that it does not install anything outside of the prefix tree.

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check-pkg

• This script takes a while to run as it has to parse the entire /var/sadm/install/contents file.
• Since this script contains the entire /var/sadm/install/contents file as a data structure in memory, it can consume a lot of system memory; on my machine it will use about 43Mb of memory with 42Mb resident.
• The calculation of checksums for all files will probably require this program to be run with root privilages. If this program is not run as root there is a good chance that there will be files it can not calculate a checksum for.

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proj-template

None known as yet

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simple-proj

None known as yet

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