Good bye ipkg, welcome opkg

March 17th, 2008

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).

Koen

March 17th, 2008 at 18:58 · Reply

Now I just need to steal your patches :)

Marcin Juszkiewicz

March 17th, 2008 at 21:34 · Reply

Koen: http://blog.haerwu.biz/download/diffs/opkg-poky/ contain GIT exported patchset of all required changes.

Lars Hallberg

March 19th, 2008 at 00:19 · Reply

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.

March 19th, 2008 at 13:20 · Reply

Lars: subscribe to opkg-devel mailing list and share your ideas there. Development of OPKG is open.