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:

• install packages and see what they have installed (especially useful when dealing with some kind of proprietary shit ;)
• uninstall packages in a reliable way
• temporary remove packages from system without physically removing them from disk
• as a consequence, have some different versions of a single package and switch them quickly. And this can even be done with glibc.
• store some metadata with particular package (say, ./configure command line or MD5 checksums list)
• make reliable and easy-to-use binary packages that can be installed without having pkg on target machine.
• as a consequence, install new systems from one already running with ability to choose packages
• tell which package given file belong to, if any, and get list of all files given package have.

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

• All information of package's files is stored in the filesystem itself. There's no place for inconsistency in package database and filesystem
• Critical pkg executables (currently, _all_ pkg executables) require no additional files/libs to run (or can be built in such way). They can be used even on a hardly damaged system
• They way pkg stores packages and their metainfo allows you to maintain package system _without_ pkg itself using only basic system utilites.
• At any given moment you may get rid of package managment, and this requires nothing beside basic system utilites (even no pkg components are necessary)
• Pkg can coexist with other package managment systems, it can manage only some of installed packages. Each package can be put under package managment or get off it separately.
• To install a new package into pkg system no knowledge is needed about the way it installs, and no information about files it installs. It may use closed-source binary installation program and install files outside given prefix - this won't break pkg system. Pkg is developed to manage packages that aren't ready for package managment and know nothing about pkg.

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

• Dependency tracking
• Updates for binary distributions (like 'rpm -U' that keeps configs)
• Automated package/updates downloading (like 'apt-get')
• Verifying packages (like 'rpm -V')

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.