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).