What is on Your Mind?

Hey Guys,
This week I installed Solaris for the first time, (trying to fix my ZFS array with some movies on it) and I noticed that unlike Linux or FreeBSD, their package management application almost encourages installing whole categories of software at a time. Theirs even a keyboard shortcut for selecting a category - like "Drivers" or "Web Services." It got me thinking, is there any harm in just installing an entire repository like that? Disk space & bandwidth aren't so scarce in most cases to make the few tens of gig's matter and it can be such a pain to have to install a new utility or library every 4 minutes when changing things up . . . . And also, if one installed everything beforehand, they wouldn't have worry about installation troubles on a tool or such during a downtime.

Now granted . . . Solaris has at most 1/10th the packages as FreeBSD or Mint . . . . but it's till something to think about. Who doesn't want three versions of every every slideshow application ever written AND the braille typesetting tools in 40 languages on the same laptop? Well. I'm gonna give it a try and see anyhow.

Reminds me of when I installed Mandrake Linux (now known as Mandriva) for the first time. I too installed absolutely everything out of curiosity, and ended up with a system so complicated I couldn't tell which bits did what. Not to mention, needed to upgrade and reinstall bits constantly.

Installing some things out of curiosity is healthy. Installing all of them can make a mess. You can always add more later.

Install the whole repo??

Interesting concept I guess but stuff that.

I once accidentally installed all packages on a fresh FreeBSD machine and left it unassisted. It was still busy after more than a week and a more senior sysadmin put an end to that. So I trust you are trying this on a spare machine with plenty disk space and have no expectation of a fully usable machine.