Re: Status

[pancake]

In Bee we've written a pkgsrc binary package manager for the HURD
in scheme (GNU Guile) using stow as a backend.

It just works, but requires a "little bit"(R) of work and testing.

The name of this project is "stut" aka "stow utility", and it allows you to
install different versions of the same package, and make visible or hide
another versions of the same.

binary pkgsrc packages are just tarball with some metadata, but you can 
tar xzvf {tarball} -C {prefix} and everything must be ok. Stut doens't handle
dependencies (yet), but using pkg_add (that comes with pkgsrc) it works
fine, resolving dependencies and downloading the rest of tarballs from the
desired repository via PKG_PATH environ.

BTW, I know that pkgsrc is not GPL. But the pkgsrc dependency of stut could be
dropped in pro to a new GNU package standard. Stut is just the frontend for
all this stuff and is GPL'd.

I think that the GNU system must implement a new package system that makes
use of all these features (stowfs, etc..), that was the reason why we start 
writting
the STUT.

You can get't by:

$ CVS_RSH=ssh cvs -d address@hidden:/bee co stut


--pancake

On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 14:04:24 +0200 (CEST)
"Alfred M. Szmidt" <address@hidden> wrote:

>    Since apt has already been ported to use RPMs
>    [http://apt-rpm.org/about.shtml], maybe we could port apt for this
>    stowfs thing? Then we could run dselect on top of it.
> 
> I don't see any specific reason why it shouldn't be possible.  GNU
> packages are are basically a bundle (tar, cpio, whatever one prefers),
> where the meta data (if any) is stored in a specific subdirectory in
> the bundle.  Porting apt would be a good thing I think, since most
> users these days are familiar with it.
> 
>    BTW - has anyone taken a serious look at using conary
>    [http://wiki.conary.com/]? I installed Foresight
>    [http://www.foresightlinux.com/] a couple of days ago and I /like/
>    the package-management (conary) end of things. conary takes care of
>    everything.
> 
> Could you describe what you like about it? How it is different from
> apt-get/etc?
> 
>    If we decided to use conary we wouldn't need to develop/use/fix
>    stowfs (or decide on ANY packaging format), and we wouldn't need to
>    port apt (or create something with similar functionality).
> 
> But would it allow us to use normal file-system calls to manage the
> system?  I.e., can one do: tar -C /stow -xvf ~/emacs-21.4.tgz, and
> have emacs installed?  I doubt this.
> 
> To be clear, we don't really have a `packaging format'.  Our packages
> are a copy of what would be on the system, but stored in a different
> directory that is `merged' (using stowfs) into a seperate view for the
> user (/bin, /share, ...).  How one then makes a bundle of this is up
> to the user, most people prefer tar+gzip, since that is what is
> commonly avaiable.
> 
> 
> I don't think it is fruitful to discuss any changes in how we should
> do thing at this point, stowfs already exist, it has some minor
> problems, lets fix those.  And then add the missing features.  It will
> only distract us from finishing things; and I think we have enough of
> distracting things as it is...
> 
> 
> Cheers.
> 
> 
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