IPS group packages consist solely of dependencies on other packages that make up a logical grouping of software. These are similar to, but not the equivalent of, Solaris 10 metaclusters. The main difference is that metaclusters are nested subsets ranging from a minimal install to nearly all packages on the media. Group packages have no such hierarchy. They can overlap other groups, or be completely disjoint sets.

A group dependency is set this way in an IPS package manifest file:

    depend fmri=full/pkg/name type=group

Current Solaris Groups

Solaris currently has 4 system groups defined. These are used for different types of installation, and are included in the xml manifest files used by the various Solaris installers:

There are also several "feature" groups such as AMP and GNU Developer Tools. These are provided for convenience, but are not used directly by any installers.

Retrieving Group Package Information

A listing of all current groups can be found with the command:

pkg info -r group/*

A listing of all the packages in a group can be obtained with:

pkg contents -o fmri -H -rt depend -a type=group groupname

An example:

$ pkg contents -o fmri -H -rt depend -a type=group solaris-desktop
archiver/gnu-tar
audio/audio-utilities
codec/flac
codec/libtheora
codec/ogg-vorbis
codec/speex
communication/im/pidgin
etc.

You can determine which package group is currently installed on your system:

$ pkg list group/system/\*  

Output would look like:

NAME (PUBLISHER)                                  VERSION                    IFO
group/system/solaris-desktop                      0.5.11-0.175.0.0.0.0.0    i--

Note that there are not version numbers associated with a group package dependency. The package version that best fits the system will be used, based on other dependencies such as what is listed in incorporation files.

Installing a Group

To Install a group, simple use the group package name as you would any other package:

$ pkg install solaris-small-server

 If you want to exclude a package from installing, you can use the --reject flag:

$ pkg install --reject audio/audio-utilities solaris-desktop

Creating Your Own Group

To create your own group package, you can follow the pkg(5) documentation on how to create a package, and use this action for each package that is part of your group:

    depend fmri=full/pkg/name type=group