Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 08:24:31 +1000 (EST) From: Peter Jeremy <Peter.Jeremy@alcatel.com.au> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Package management (was Re: Come on guys, close a PR or two, will ya ?) Message-ID: <199804152224.IAA03296@gsms01.alcatel.com.au>
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On Wed, 15 Apr 1998 19:30:15 +0200 (CEST), Marino Ladavac <lada@pc8811.gud.siemens.at> wrote: >I could take a look at it if you don't mind SystemV packaging style. Some disadvantages of the SysV package style (or at least Sun's implementation thereof): 1) There's no provision for compressing the package. This is fairly essential for Internet-based distribution. 2) The `datastream' format can only be understood by the package management tools - whilst the guts are a cpio (yuk) archive, there's a header that needs to be stripped off before cpio can understand it. If we're thinking about replacing the existing package management tools, we'd be better off defining exactly what we want the tools to do, before porting the package management tools from another OS. My suggestions for the requirements (in order): 1) Menu-driven interface (in addition to the command line interface). The current pkg_manage is probably OK as a UI, but is incredibly slow (because of the amount of package unpacking it does). 2) Able to retrieve packages via FTP (and through firewalls using at least SOCKS and FTP-over-HTTP proxies) 3) Transparent support for compressed packages. 4) Package dependency management (preferably automatic - ie pkgadd will automatically extract any prerequisite packages - with appropriate messages and able to be disabled). 5) Ability to upgrade a package (ie replace an older version with a newer one) without having to explicitly delete the old version (which implies deleting all its dependencies) first. This may mean the ability to specify prerequisites as `exactly this version' (which may be a substring of the actual version) or `this version or later'. 6) Package contents and description can be determined quickly (ie without unpacking the entire package) 7) Package validation (eg using MD5 checksums) both as the package is being installed, and of installed packages (to check for bitrot). 8) Package contents can be extracted using normal tools (eg tar, gzip) if necessary (this may be mutually exclusive with 6 above). 9) Packages can be installed without requiring a staging area equal in size to the unpacked package. Unfortunately, at this stage, I don't have the spare time to actually implement suitable tools. Peter -- Peter Jeremy (VK2PJ) peter.jeremy@alcatel.com.au Alcatel Australia Limited 41 Mandible St Phone: +61 2 9690 5019 ALEXANDRIA NSW 2015 Fax: +61 2 9690 5247 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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