Re: [sdd] [glossary] Artifact

[Randy George <randyg@us.ibm.com>]

James,
  I agree with your clarification.
 Thx.

Regards,
Randy George

Senior Technical Staff Member
Provisioning Architecture
Tivoli Software, IBM Software Group
Austin, TX  
(512) 838-0752     T/L 678-0752

James Falkner <james.falkner@sun.com>

01/09/2006 11:58 AM

To	Randy George/Austin/IBM@IBMUS
cc	sdd@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject	Re: [sdd] [glossary] Artifact

Randy George wrote:
> 
> James,
>   The one comment that I have is with the statement:  "Smallest
> referenceable unit".  Some artifacts are a collection of
multiple files, 
> e.g. a MSI artifact.  In this case, a "file" is the
smallest 
> referenceable unit wrt to data transfer, etc.


The intent of that phrase is to highlight that things inside of the
artifact cannot be referenced by any other SDD-specific element.
That is, artifacts are opaque with respect to SDD.  You cannot refer
to one of the embedded MSI tables from another SDD element. So,
while artifacts might be made up of smaller units (such as your
MSI example), those smaller quarks are not visible and cannot be
referenced by SDD elements, even though they can be and are accessed
internally by perhaps MSI or other installer runtimes.

-jhf-