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