Oscar del Rio's comment on a previous entry has led me to take a look at blastwave.org for my Sun freeware needs; I had previously tried out sunfreeware.com , mostly because that comes up first for a Google search on [Sun Freeware] .

Blastwave is a breath of fresh air on Solaris, in that it is a clumsier version of what I've come to expect as basic functionality from Linux package managers like apt and yum : you have your automatic fetching of stuff and running of pkgadd , you have dependencies (that get automatically fetched too), and you even have digital signatures. Solaris being Solaris, pkgadd will periodically stop to ask you questions and the whole thing is a bit noisy (and slow).

But that's all just convenience. The way Blastwave has won my heart is by putting all of its stuff in one place that it owns completely, /opt/csw . This is clearly the right way on Solaris, since the convention is that you put your stuff in a directory in /opt and no one else touches it.

By contrast, Sunfreeware seems to like dumping stuff in /usr/local . This makes me nervous and unhappy, because a lot of things may feel that they have a right to drop stuff in /usr/local , and this is a recipe for collisions and problems down the road.

The downside of blastwave.org is that it eats up a lot of disk space; using it to install just Subversion, NTP, and GNU textutils on a system used up 179 megabytes of disk space and wound up with 25 packages.