Embedded package managers sucks

2009-07-02T14:08:00+02:00

Years ago someone wrote IPKG in pure shell. It can be still found in some distributions. Then it was rewritten into C and this version we used in OpenEmbedded derived systems. It had some bugs, we patched some of them, from time to time there was even upstream development done for it.

Then Openmoko arrived and forked IPKG — new project got OPKG name. It was written by OpenedHand and Openmoko developers. Their main goals were:

callbacks for GUI package managers
GPG signed repositories
fixing bugs

Many things got changed, OE patches got merged, new bugs was added. Those who use CLI version of opkg (so far the only usable client) lost some functionalities — for example there is no progress bar when packages are fetched.

For last few months OPKG is in unmaintained mode again and I think that this is some kind of curse on embedded market package managers.

Some time ago I discovered that when many (>50) packages needs to be upgraded then opkg segfaults during process and this is not a matter of going out of RAM as I have ~400MB free. Today it did not gave value of PATH for post install scripts… I wonder what else can be found ;(

What are other options? So far I know two — dpkg + apt or rpm + yum. First one costs few megabytes of space, second one require also Python so it is not acceptable for most of our targets. Both also require rebuilding of everything :(

RPM is Really Poorly Maintained

2006-10-17T14:19:00+02:00

I created openembedded-essential package for Debian derived distributions which depend on all packages required by OpenEmbedded. It took me about 5 minutes to get first version working and 15 to get it polished. Resulting package depends on needed stuff and contain only own changelog.

Then I tried to create RPM version for all those Red Hat/Fedora/Mandriva derived distros… RPM HowTo is from 1999 year and RPM 4.4.1 refuse to work with spec from this HowTo. So I started to dig for other manuals — found one from 2002, then some others. But still no idea how to build RPM package which DOES NOT have sources and/or patches — just pure dependencies and own changelog.

How does RPM based maintainers do their job? Thats probably a good question…

Marcin Juszkiewicz - rpm

Embedded package managers sucks

RPM is Really Poorly Maintained