Solaris package upgrade - solaris

Question

I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around how Solaris 11 does packaging. I understand that there is a yum type packaging approach, but I would expect there to be a rpm -i and rpm -U approach that allows a package to be delivered and then installed or upgrade.
For now I have tracked down how to make a package, ie pkgmk and pkgtrans. Given this I can create a "foo_1.0.pkg" file that can be installed like this:
pkgadd -d foo_1.0.pkg
However I can not figure out how to upgrade this package with "foo_2.0.pkg":
root#hostname # pkgadd -d foo_2.0.pkg
The following packages are available:
1 foo foo
(x86) private_build
Select package(s) you wish to process (or 'all' to process
all packages). (default: all) [?,??,q]: all
Processing package instance <foo> from </root/foo_2.0.pkg>
foo(x86) private_build
Current administration requires that a unique instance of the <foo>
package be created. However, the maximum number of instances of the
package which may be supported at one time on the same system has
already been met.
No changes were made to the system.
What am I doing wrong? It would appear that i should use pkg update, but this seems to imply that I need to release my pkg in a repo.

Answer 1

First, you aren't using Solaris 11 packaging (IPS) but the legacy SVR4 packaging.
With the latter, you cannot upgrade a custom package. The only way is then simply to remove the old package and install the newer one, which is what rpm -U is doing under the hood anyway.
pkgrm foo
pkgadd -d foo_2.0.pkg foo

Answer 2

I had the same problem, but I was able to workaround it by passing a config file into the cmd. This is especially useful in a script when used with the "echo |" as it bypasses the confirmation prompt as well. The config file overwrites the default install properties which are located in a file here: /var/sadm/install/admin/default. The key is the instance=overwrite line. I changed some of the others as well, to avoid any other prompts that may come up. As an alternate solution you can change the default file directly and not have to reference the additional config file.
with myprog1.0 (or 2.0) already installed run the following command.
echo | pkgadd -a /opt/myprog/install.conf -d myprog2.0
contents of /opt/myprog/install.conf file:
mail=
instance=overwrite
partial=nocheck
runlevel=nocheck
idepend=nocheck
rdepend=nocheck
space=ask
setuid=ask
conflict=nocheck
action=nocheck
networktimeout=60
networkretries=3
authentication=quit
keystore=/var/sadm/security
proxy=

Answer 3

$UPDATE
This variable does not exist under most installation environments. If it does exist (with the value yes), it means that a PKG with the same name, version and architecture is already installed on the system or that the installing PKG will overwrite an installed PKG. The original BASEDIR is then used.
So, this variable you can use in preinstall or postinstall script for any updation.