sol-inst is a collection of Perl modules to access basic installation
information on a Solaris system.

Solaris::InstallDB      Manages and searches for packages
Solaris::Contents       Reads/accesses /var/sadm/install/contents
Solaris::Package        Reads the pkginfo file for a given package
Solaris::Patchdiag      Reads a patchdiag.xref file

BACKGROUND

A long time ago, I had a conversation with a fellow engineer about how to
properly jumpstart a Solaris server.  He was convinced that the only
proper way to bring up a new server was to use the SUNWCall cluster, and
then delete the software you didn't need.  For example, if I didn't need
X-Windows, I should just "rm -rf /usr/openwin/"

Others argued that SUNWCreq doesn't really install the necessary software
needed to maintain a running system, but they never really elaborated on
what exactly that missing software was.

So, I took it up as a project to learn more about Solaris packages, the
jumpstart process, patching, etc, etc.  I read the Jumpstart book, the
Application Packaging Developers Guide, and various man pages.

After awhile I noticed that a lot of the package data files were
relatively simple formats, so I wrote some perl scripts to do some
simple operations, and ended up creating these modules.

INSTALLATION

       perl Makefile.PL
       make
       make test
       make install

SUPPORT

This code is considered beta.  My only testing environment is my own
network, so there are situations I haven't considered.  I will try to
respond to bug reports, but there may be some situations where I can't
replicate the environment you are encountering an error in.

FUTURE WORK

If these modules prove to be useful, it would seem logical to create more
modules to handle other installation data or installation operations.  For
example, modules to read the .clustertoc/.cdtoc files, modules to represent
patch distributions, or even modules to access Sun online resources, like
SunSolve or the Fingerprint database.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2000 Chris Josephes

This library is free software, and you are free to use it under the same
terms as Perl itself.

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