[haiku-development] Some thoughts on package management
- From: Adrien Destugues <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 11:25:52 +0200
Hi,
After some time working in a package managed environment and listening to
complaints on the IRC channel, I have some suggestions to make on the
current state of package management. I'd like to hear your advice before I
actually start making some changes, or maybe someone else will do the
changes?
So, while most users can get away with having /boot/system read-only
(that's a good thing despite the incompatibilities it has with some
software and/or installers), most of them don't agree with having
home/config read-only. I agree on that, and think we should leave the user
manage its home directory the way he needs it.
Having a package-managed home/config is useless. The purpose was to mount
home-grown packages there, but since this isn't looked up by the
development tools, it's not handy to drop a library or devel package there
and have it working immediately. Only 'final' packages (binaries and apps)
can be used there, and even that requires some extra support so the
packages look for everything in their .self directory. It also makes it
unpractical to have an app in /system and add-ons for it in /home/config
On the other hand, we really need a way to tell apart 'managed' packages
(installed from pkgman) from 'non-managed' ones. This information can be
retrieved from pkgman, but tagging the packages somehow (say an FS
attribute) with the source URL/repo would be nice. This would make it
possible to query for 'all packages installed from haikuports' or 'all
packages installed manually'.
Finally, I'd suggest mounting all packages in /system, no matter if they
come from /system/packages or /home/config/packages. In a multiuser system
this would mean each user sees a different /system directory, but it allows
installing custom packages for each user in a transparent way. This allows
the user to keep untested packages in /boot/home, and possibly boot in safe
mode without enabling those if something goes wrong. Yet, it keeps the FS
hierarchy simpler, with a single package-FS managed directory in the system.
--
Adrien.
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