So just for some fun I downloaded latest dotpet of sc0ttman's pkg, untarred it, and merged the result into my pre-built firstrib_rootfs and ./mount_chroot.sh into that via my XenialDog64 host.
Using xbps-install I installed what seemed to be some of the major pkg dependencies: coreutils, sed, grep, findutils, wget. I had hoped pkg would work with busybox versions of these, but it had problems without the full versions (despite pkg advertised dependencies saying busybox wget and find okay, that didn't prove to be the case). When I first ran pkg --help it complained something about no repos, so I opened up BionicPup64 sfs and manually copied and pasted its /var/packages folder contents into firstrib_rootfs /root/.packages (a directory that came with the pkg installation). A symlink back to /var/packages approach would have been a bit better...
So on running pkg --help, pkg gave me its startup help screen (as shown on attached screenshot).
I also did a: pkg --update-sources
"pkg list-deps kodi" also worked, though it was a bit slow to report the dependencies.
I then got ambitious and tried installing frisbee (since I noticed it was in the current repo). pkg came back and said it was already built-in (as it is in BionicPup64 of course). I checked pkg script and noted it worked that out from /root/.packages/woof-installed-packages. So I cheated, and deleted the frisbee entry from that file, and once again tried: pkg add frisbee (actually ended up doing it twice so used pkg -f -g add frisbee command).
And pkg tried to do it's job and succeeded partially at least, as the second attached screenshot shows (despite Error on installation being indicated, frisbee binary, and various of its dependencies, was certainly now found on the system).
So could we build a Puppy via FirstRib and installed pkg (with pkg dependencies themselves installed using xbps)? Seems like it is possible... but I won't be doing it (my experiment was a very quick one just out of curiousity and I can't be bothered working harder on that since I have other priorities). Maybe interesting for someone to try though. Once pkg correctly set up xbps could be removed of course. I do wish pkg could have worked with busybox alone though, and I got the feeling pkg might unfortunately depend on a lot more underlying puppy core files than I dealt with, which would be a pity really. Nice if pkg could be made standalone capable, such as xbps - then it would be simple to build a FirstRib Puppy flavour. Nevertheless, the experiment suggested pkg was close to being capable of standalone (with say busybox) operation.
wiak
EDIT: Have since added petget (files takes from BionicDog64) so I could try "pkg repo-update". Basically just copied over the whole folder /usr/local/petget and then made a symlink ln -s /usr/local/petget /usr/bin/petget/petget. I'm not sure what difference having petget has (and would prefer anyway if pkg was not petget dependent in anyway). I think I needed to use xbps to install bash (with ncurses-base) for petget to work.
EDIT2: Also added dpkg-deb binary from BionicPup64 into /usr/bin and as a new test did:
and that seems to have successfully installed. Trouble with Puppy building, however, is that it doesn't use its package manager for its complete build; first it simply downloads a rootfs-skeleton containing tons of files in a fixed directory structure - that's a bit of a pain IMO, but I guess I can try that and see if I can end up with some form of BionicPup64 root filesystem (after also getting selection of woof-CE rootfs-packages and other packages such as specified in DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-ubuntu-bionic). I'm tempted to try - will think about it tomorrow... Main thing is, that if pkg and petget are now working correctly it should I feel now be possible to build a puppy based on FirstRib.