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.
