Proposal to support Monoliths

1
Proposal to support Monoliths

• Rich Aquino
• Macrovision
• June 7, 2007

2
Problem Statement

• There are existing installations that use a
  single installer binary that contains selectable
  content, i.e., a monolithic artifact.
• The current SDD concept of artifacts is that they
  are atomic and do not contain selectable content,
  i.e., there is support only for atomic
  artifacts. Selection is always done by selecting
  whole artifacts, never portions of artifacts.
• These monolithic artifacts often expect input
  arguments that have a list of values, e.g., a
  list of selected features.
• The current SDD definition of arguments does not
  support values that consist of a list of values.

3
Proposal

• Add a shared boolean attribute (defaults to
  false) to ArtifactType.
• This will enable multiple Artifact elements in
  multiple IUs to share the same artifact file (or
  resourceRef), and will tell the runtime to
  process the artifact file only a single time no
  matter how many IUs share it.
• Enable NameAndOptionalValuePairType to specify
  that the value will be appended to a parameter of
  the same name.
• New boolean attribute called append optional,
  false
• New string attribute called delimiter optional

4
Examples

• Shared
• ltsdd-ddInstallArtifact type"executable"
  fileRef"win_bundle" shared"true"gt
• Append
• ltsdd-ddArgument name"FEATURE_LIST"
  value"THIS_IU_FEATURE" append"true"
  delimiter"" /gt

5
Open Questions

• Can additional files differ in shared artifacts?
  What if both include substitution instructions?
• When appending argument values, how to handle
  identical values?
• What if artifact is shared but no other artifact
  with same fileRef/resourceRef exists? Error or
  ignore?
• If a shared artifact is selected for a particular
  deployment but no other artifact with same
  file/resourceRef, error or ignore?
• How to share output values?