Image Packaging System
| Company type | Software |
|---|---|
| Industry | Package management |
| Founder | OpenSolaris community, Sun Microsystems |
Area served | Solaris 11, Illumos-derived distributions (OpenIndiana, OmniOS, XStreamOS), Windows, Linux, OS X, Darwin, AIX |
| Products | Package management system |
| Owner | OpenSolaris community, Sun Microsystems |
The Image Packaging System (IPS) is a cross-platform package management system created by the OpenSolaris community in collaboration with Sun Microsystems. It serves as the package management framework for Solaris 11 and a variety of Illumos-derived distributions such as OpenIndiana, OmniOS, and XStreamOS. Additionally, IPS supports layered software solutions including GlassFish. The system is implemented using the Python programming language.
Features
Administrators can utilize IPS to efficiently search for, install, and uninstall software packages on Solaris-based environments.[1] Notable capabilities include:
- Integration with ZFS, facilitating multiple boot environments and streamlined rollback of package changes
- Transaction-based management of packages ensuring consistency
- Ability to support diverse platform architectures within a single package
- Compatibility with traditional SVR4 package formats
- Enhanced search syntax and ability to perform remote queries
- Updates that deliver only incremental modifications
- Support for network-hosted package repositories and publishing mechanisms
- Comprehensive logs detailing package operations
- Utilization of an on-disk package format identified by the .p5p extension
- Cross-platform functionality enabling layered applications across Windows, Linux, OS X, Darwin, Solaris, OpenSolaris, Illumos, and AIX
- Notifications for updates across platforms combined with graphical interfaces for managing packages
Considerations
IPS distributes files individually, each verified by its own checksum, which allows updates to replace solely altered files. For ELF binaries, checksum calculations focus exclusively on loaded segments; therefore, modifications to non-loaded areas such as comments do not cause updates. Nonetheless, this granular file delivery approach can lead to slower performance when accessing sources over high-latency media like internet connections or optical drives.
External links
- GitHub Project: Image Packaging System
- Multi-Platform Packaging for Layered Distros
- GlassFish Update Center Toolkit
- Update Center 2.0 (multiplatform IPS)
- ↑ Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2123: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).