During last days I was working on switching Poky Linux into using OPKG package manager. Today whole work was merged into trunk and we got rid of non-maintained IPKG.
What is OPKG? It is fork of IPKG (from handhelds.org) done for Openmoko distribution. It has all usable patches from OpenEmbedded related projects merged and got some new features:
- libcurl instead of wget for fetching
- GPG signing of repositories is now possible
- GUI package managers can have own callbacks
- sends download progress updates to libopkg clients
- marks packages that were installed to satisfy dependancies (auto installed)
- additional command line option to remove “auto installed” packages
- support for faceted classification (similar to debtags) – not used yet
And most important — it is maintained (which can not be told about ipkg).
Related posts:
Now I just need to steal your patches :)
Koen: http://blog.haerwu.biz/download/diffs/opkg-poky/ contain GIT exported patchset of all required changes.
My no 1 wish on package systems is policy. The signing is good infrastructure, but functionality is lacking:
1) Install script must be optional, end user applications should not need them in general (think ipkg can do this).
2) There need to be possible to set a policy for witch packages may have scripts (based on package source and/or signature).
It’s fairly reasonable to run semi trusted software as a regular user, and SE-linux going more and more mainstream makes it even more and more reasonable.
But it’s not reasonable to give a semi-trusted package maintainer full root-access.
Lars: subscribe to opkg-devel mailing list and share your ideas there. Development of OPKG is open.
Where is the main web site for OPKG?
Who are the maintainers?