PKG

a package managment system


Most programs for Linux (and other modern Unixes) come as source archive and use some kind of 'make install' to deploy themselves in the system. That's nothing wrong here, beside the fact that it's almost impossible to uninstall such package from the system. They waste disk space even if they aren't in use.

Pkg, just like any other package managment system, is an approach to solve this and some related problems.

It's main idea is to install each package in a separate directory and use symlinks to deploy those file where they are expected to be. See how it works

Releases

Current release is 0.7
See Project file list or download pkg-0.7.tar.gz (91k) directly.

Documentation

It's hard to maintain two copies of docs in parallel, so there's no docs on this site. Not yet. All pkg's documentation comes with the package itself in form of man pages.

Features

Some nifty things pkg system allows you to do:

Some features of pkg system I'm trying to maintain:

Some features expected for a package managment system that pkg does NOT have:

Just to say, none of this is an inherent shortcoming of choosen structure. This features can be added lately or done via separate tools without breaking or changing pkg itself.

WARNING

Pkg system is a proof-of-concept, an implementation of an interesting idea rather than a tool created to be used without backup on mission-critical servers.

There are some packages that require manual tweaking when used with pkg, there are some packages that pkg-install refuses to install, there are still some tasks that you have to do manually. There are situations when I say "You should NOT use pkg here".

Bugs here

This page is incomplete and should be rewritten (hm...)

(also, there are lots of bugs in pkg itself)

Author

Alex Suykov <alex_suykov@ukr.net>

Feel free to submit your patches and ideas, though it's not guaranteed they will be commited into the main branch of the project. Small size and simplicity may be preferred over new features.


last update 18.08.2006