Tribblix progress

I recently put out a Milestone 12 image for Tribblix.

It updates illumos, built natively on Tribblix. There's been a bit of discussion recently about whether illumos needs actual releases, as opposed to being continuously updated. It doesn't have releases, so when I come to make a Tribblix release I simply check out the current gate, build, and package it. After all, it's supposed to be ready to ship at any time.

Note that I don't maintain a fork of illumos-gate, I build it essentially as-is. This is the same for all the components I build for Tribblix - I keep true to unmodified upstream as much as possible.

The one change I have made is to SVR4 packaging. I've removed the dependency on openssl and wanboot (bug #5188), which is a good thing. It means that you can't use signed SVR4 packages, but I've never encountered one. Nor can pkgadd now directly retrieve a package via http, but the implementation via wanboot was spectacularly dire, and you're much better off using curl or wget, which allows proper repository management (as zap does). Packaging is a little quicker now, but this change also makes it much easier to update openssl in future (it's difficult to update something your packaging system is linked against).

Tribblix is now firmly committed to gcc4 (as opposed to the old gcc3 in OpenSolaris). I've rebuilt gcc to fix visibility support. If you've ever seen 'warning: visibility attribute not supported in this configuration' then you'll have stumbled across this. Basically, you need to ensure objdump is found during the gcc build - either by making sure it's in the path or by setting OBJDUMP to point to it.

I've added a new style of zones - alternate root zones. These are sparse root zones, but instead of inheriting from the global zone you can use an alternate installed image. More on that later.

There's the usual slew of updates to various packages, including the obviously sensitive bash and openssl.

There's an interesting fix to python. I put software that might come in multiple versions underneath /usr/versions and use symlinks so that applications can be found in the normal locations. Originally, /usr/bin/python was a symlink that went to ../versions/python-x.y.x/bin/python. This works fine most of the time. However, if you called it as /bin/python it couldn't find its modules, so the symlink has to be ../../usr/versions/python-x.y.x/bin/python which makes things work as desired.

The package catalogs now contain package sizes and checksums, allowing verification of downloaded packages. I need to update zap to actually use this data, and to retry or resume failed or incomplete downloads. (It's a shame that curl doesn't automatically resume incomplete downloads the way that wget does.)

At a future milestone, upgrades will be supported (regular package updates have worked for a while, I'm talking about a whole distro upgrade here). It's possible to upgrade by hand already, but it requires a few extra workarounds (such as forcing postremove scripts to always exit 0) to make it work properly. I've got most of the preparatory work in place now. Upgrading zones looks a whole lot more complicated, though (and I haven't really seen it done well elsewhere).

Now, off to work on the next update.