== Something I'd like to be easier in Solaris's IPS

IPS is the 'Image Packaging System', which seems to be essentially the
default packaging system for Illumos distributions. Or at least it's
the packaging system for several of them, most importantly [[OmniOS
http://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/WikiStart]], and Oracle's Solaris 11,
if you care about the latter. IPS is in some ways very clever and nifty
but as a sysadmin there are some bits I wish it did differently, or at
least easier. Particularly I wish that it made it easier to download and
archive complete packages.

You may be wondering how a package system can possibly make that hard.
I'm glad you asked. You see, IPS is not a traditional package system; if
you want an extremely crude simplification it's more like git. In this
git-like approach, the files for all packages are stored together in a
hash-based content store and 'packages' are mostly just indexes of what
hash identifier goes where with what permissions et al. This has various
nominal advantages but also has the drawback that there is no simple
package blob to download, the way there is in other packaging formats.

There are two related ways to get copies of IPS packages for yourself,
both using the low-level _pkgrecv_ command (instead of the higher-level
_pkg_ command). The most obvious way is to have _pkgrecv_ just write
things out into a _pkg(5)_ file ('_pkgrecv -a -d ..._'). The drawback
of this is that it really does write out *everything* it downloaded to
a single file. This is fine if you're just downloading one package but
it's not so great if you're using the _-r_ switch to have _pkgrecv_
download a package and its dependencies. The more complex way is to
actually create your own local repo (which is a directory tree) with
'_pkgrepo create /your/dir_', then use _pkgrecv_ (without _-a_) to
download packages into that repo. This gives you everything you want at
the cost of, well, having that repo instead of simple package files that
you can easily copy around separately and so on.

(Both _pkgrecv_ variants also have the drawback that you have to give
them an explicit repository URL. Among other things this makes it hard
to deal with cross-repository dependencies, for example if a package
from an additional repository needs some new packages from the core
distribution repo.)

What I'd like is a high-level _pkg_ command (or a command option) that
handled all of this complexity for me and wrote out separate _pkg(5)_
files for each separate package.

(In theory I could do this with a shell script if various _pkg_
subcommands had stable and sufficiently machine-parseable output.
I haven't looked into _pkg_ enough to know if it does; right now
I'm at the point where I'm just poking around [[OmniOS]].)

=== Sidebar: why sysadmins care about getting copies of packages

The simple answer is because sometimes we want to be able to (re)build
exact copies of some system, not 'the system but with some or all of
the packages updated to current versions'. We also don't want to have
to depend on a remote package source staying in operation or keeping
those packages around for us, because we've seen package sources go away
(or decide that they need to clean up before their disk space usage
explodes).