Packaging with the Solaris IPS
I needed to package some software for Solaris 11 and of course wanted to use the Image Packaging System, IPS, the new package management system that replaces the old SVR4 package format that Solaris 10 and previous releases used. To the casual observer, it looks like IPS brings "easy" package management to Solaris - it is now possible to quickly search for - and install - a package from the internet, and updates are easily retrieved as well. This seems to work smoothly - just like on Debian for example - which has had this functionality for more than a decade... Well, better late than never!
Since the system is not just new, but quite different from what it replaces, I started looking for primers and tutorials to figure out how to get started. A word of caution: IPS does things differently, and there are some tutorials on the net which attempt to fight IPS instead of working with it - this leads to complicated and silly ways of building packages the wrong way, and this will cause problems for your end users. What you really want, is to go to the official Oracle documentation and read the developer guide which is well written and does a very good job of explaining why IPS is different and walks you through an example of creating a package.
So far, I am fairly impressed with IPS - it is the first packaging system (and I have used quite a few - from DEC Unix and HP-UX to NetWare, Debian, Red Hat, Windows and what have you) where I did not have to script to create a user account. Scripting, by the way, is disallowed by IPS for the simple reason that you cannot validate a package if the installation executes scripts because you cannot (generally) validate the result of a script. Instead of using all the provided tools for generating manifests from older packages, I simply wrote the .p5m manifest files myself and generated .p5p repository archives from them. In the future I guess I should make sure the repositories are on-line, so that the users can get their software updates along with the operating system updates when they run pkg update.