(OLD) (ARCHIVED) Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[jamesjeffries2]

Been out of the puppy loop for a while due to having to learn lots about debian for work. Good to be back using puppy, much friendlier feel to it.

Anyway, working on a command line based package manager for puppy. a sort of apt-get style thing that we can link up to ibilio or any other puppy software repository.

After I have the basic functionality working I want to work on getting it be able to install packages from other distributions too such as .deb .rpm etc.

Would anyone use this? and what do some of the more technical people think about using other package formats?

Jim

[Eyes-Only]

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[Jim1911]

jamesjeffries2,

I'm sure that such an application will be embraced. But, as Eyes-Only said, there is work being done that you may want to check out, for example dposil already has done considerable work on getting apt-get and synaptic to work with his dpup and he expects them to be ready for release later this month.

Welcome back,
Jim

[technosaurus]

petget (and install.sh) can do a lot of this (pet, tgz and deb) from the command line already, but not rpm AFAIK. I also made a patch to be able to use txz (needs xz and tar 1.22+)

[gposil]

The latest rpm as in Mandriva2010, Suse and FC is a bit of a mystery, no one can tell me definitively how to unpack one...rpm2cpio does not work on them...Any clues

[amigo]

gposil, can you supply a link to one of the rpm's which is not working?

[gposil]

ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandriva/devel/cooker/i586//media/contrib/release/abiword-2.8.1-1mdv2010.0.i586.rpm

[amigo]

Thanks, I'll see what I can do about this -I've found others which did not unpack with certain tools.

[aragon]

if that helps: 7z shows me that inside the rpm there is the following archive

[amigo]

I think you are onto the answer there aragon -the funny thing is that these brand-new archives are created with a(very) old version of rpm. I have occassionally had problems with some these, but have been able to decompress them using rpm2tgz or disrpm.

I#m going to llok at the rpm-3.x sources being used by these distros to see what is going on.

[amigo]

Okay, I cam up with this which seems to work with rpm2cpio, whether from rpm-3.x or rpm-4.x:

[jamesjeffries2]

hmm, you are right looks like a lot of the work i was thinking of is already done!

WOW! for me one of the big things that i prefered in other distros was the package manager, but this looks really good.

I'm going to have to rethink this a bit, but I would still like a command version I think for my "puppy server" that I only access over ssh.

[jamesjeffries2]

So my understanding is this:

- which ever distro the puppy that you are using is based on can use the packages from that distro in the package manager
- and the user can add any repo from said distro


What I want to do is:

- for ANY puppy user to be able to install what ever packages they want.
- and the user can add ANY repo that contains these packages
- and dependencies can be satisfied cross distribution
- all from the command line

Should be a challenge, especially the cross package dependency stuff

[amigo]

Mixing programs and libs from different distros -even from different versions of the same distro is a bad idea. And the easier you make doing that, the more problems you create for the user.

Since there are over 1,000 distros out there, why not just build a program which will randomly install one program or library from each of themx --what do you suppose the result would be?

[Lobster]

There are two major sources of files
RPM (Red Hat/Fedora) and OpenSuse also using RPM
I believe.
Would that be a good place to start?
Much linux software offered
seems designed for usage by either Red Hat or Suse . . ..