pkgtool CLI package manager

[fitzhugh]

One more thing: Nathan, I'm going camping Monday through Friday - a few days more than I believe I had said previously. While planned for some time - before I found Puppy, actually - this clearly comes at an inconvenient time (though I can't really complain about heading off to the north coast redwoods an Irish Wolfhound, two Great Danes, and a friend I've yet to meet in person.) If this will be too long a delay for your tastes then by all means I'll willingly abdicate in favor of someone more appropriate. Otherwise I will be able to jump in and make it my priority when I return, as opposed to these past few days in which I had to wrap up what I was already doing - finished just in time for me to leave for five days. I've had just enough spare time to poke my head into the various potential languages and ways of approaching this and pick tcl/tk as a good choice (not a scientific selection at all; the syntax is makes sense, widgets look OK, and it's not going anywhere. This was just a few hours each day, while upon returning I will have little else to distract me and most of each day for such projects till the end of summer.
Please do let me know if this break will be too much of a hold for your tastes, I don't have a sense of your timing, though it is clear you are putting a lot of effort into this.

[Nathan F]

Take your time, seriously. I'm still chipping away at the base myself. In fact I just did another commit to svn that cleans the code a bit and should make your job easier. The pre_process_deps function can now be called externally and write it's output to a file, so a gui can just call it and read the file instead of trying to get the info from the console or duplicate it's function.

My goal is not to leave a whole lot that you will have to re-implement. You should not have to code functions into your gui that the underlying program could do.

Nathan

[Nathan F]

Okay, I just commited a new revision that fixes several problems. There was code in there before, that listed any dependent packages after installation. Unfortunately it displayed this info even if the packages in question were already installed. I have now fixed this, and the message is only displayed if you decline to install a package during the dependency resolution step. These deps are still the ones listed in packages.txt, I have not implemented handling of the info files yet to parse their dependency lists (if available).

I also cleaned up the uninstall function a bit and made sure that packages remove their registration with pupget correctly. I still need to double check to see if the keywords are being dealt with correctly during an uninstall but I think they should be.

I will be releasing another tarball and dotpup shortly for those who don't want to use svn or don't know how. I think the code is just about stable enough now that it could be used without any particular warnings, and maybe even included in an iso (OneBone!). I of course have more planned and will continue to work on it, but in it's current state it's pretty reliable and I should be able to add the rest of the features I want without performing major surgery or breaking things.

Nathan

[klhrevolutionist]

Glad to hear. I really like this project.

Why ?

1. Dotpups are easy to make, but alien pkgs. are even easier.

2. rarsa has XDG working, which solves the menu crisis for me...

3. Enables hacking of pupget to use pkgtool, which will increase pupget's overall speed !!!

4. Enables pupget to recieve a face lift with enchanced features. Of course this is optional, but nice...

I usually extract pkgs. and install manually, so the gui is for the pups. So i have to ask this probably again. Does pkgtool have the feature of reading from multiple websites ?

[Nathan F]

Does pkgtool have the feature of reading from multiple websites ?

Yes, but maybe not in exactly the way you mean. It reads the file pkgsource.txt (inside ~/.packages) for it's list of mirrors. There can be as many or few mirrors as you want. But the list of packages is still the same list that is included in the iso at it's time of creation. One of my goals is to create a way to update that but right now it is not done. What it will do however, is go through the mirrors you have listed searching for the package you want until it finds it, so if it's not on the first server it just goes to the next and tries, and the next, until it runs out of servers to try.

For a good way to distribute 'unofficial' packages your Downloader program and MU's updated Software Installer look like they fit that bill better. In those cases pkgtool is just a link in the toolchain, providing the installation stage.

Nathan

[fitzhugh]

Take your time, seriously.

famous last words...

My goal is not to leave a whole lot that you will have to re-implement. You should not have to code functions into your gui that the underlying program could do.

That's what I've gathered. I'll certainly start working only on dropping a gui on top of what is there, and suspect that I will remain in that state of catch-up until after you finish your initial work. Sounds good to me.

I got back from my road trip/camping with a wolfhound and two great danes.... thankfully my friend had just purchased the largest tent I've ever seen (by far... two rooms! could jump and not hit my head! Thank god we weren't backpacking and having to carry the thing). Thought I was in time for yesterday's meeting, but instead found my computer dying. Will take time to fix, but my friend also gave me a new computer that is twice as fast/large etc. So, I've now managed to get it 95% set up the way I like (again... I'm getting pretty good at reinstalling and configuring puppy now that I've hosed my install a few times, erased my pup_save file entirely once, and had to replace the whole computer again ). This means I'm finally able to actually START the project, rather than just learn about it, about tcl/tk, puppy, etc. No idea how fast it will go until I start. Oh, forgot to install subversion again... oops. One more step then, a quick one.

Thanks Nathan. I'll undoubtedly have questions as I go, though I'll do my best to answer them myself, of course. How would you prefer them dumped on you? on this thread? pm? however is fine with me.
if you prefer email: