As to what I'm writing, well, I'm going to do the design in about four weeks time, and anybody who is interested can take a look. An announcement will probably go up on -hackers and -libh...
....
I want something that works. To be honest, just something that abstracts /usr/ports and makes use of the pkg-descr files would be more useful than the current blank void navigated with cd and more...
Paul,
When you get ready to do some work, let me know. I've been rewriting the guts of pkg_add for the last month or two. I'm pretty pleased with the results so far, but there's still a lot of code to write.
So far: * libtarfile works. This is a library that provides simple iteration over tarfiles. It handles format detection (e.g., both old/Posix/GNU formats and gzip/bzip2/etc compression), can 'extract' entries to disk or to an in-memory buffer, etc. The read support is pretty solid; the write support is just a sketch. * Direct package extraction works. I can open a package file from stdin, disk, ftp, etc, and just install it without having to create a temp directory or any of that nonsense. The idea: extract the packing list into memory, parse it, use it to direct the extraction of the rest of the package. This is _MUCH_ faster than the older pkg_add code. * I've also completely overhauled the packing-list parsing code and a lot of the other basic operations.
Next steps: * Requirements handling: I have some recursive requirements handling, but I'm not entirely happy with it. I'm exploring other approaches. * Locating packages. This will probably involve building a DB file in /var/db/pkg to record information about what packages are available from which ftp sites, etc. * Handling conflicts gracefully. This may well involve building a DB file that maps filenames->package names so that an attempt to overwrite a file can be immediately tracked back to the conflicting package. * Building a useful library. I'm being careful to keep code as generic as possible, so it should be pretty simple to put a lot of the useful pieces (packing-list management, locating packages, etc) into a library.
Like I said, let me know when you're ready to work on this. My stuff is still pretty rough in some spots, but a lot of it should prove useful to anyone working on install issues.
Tim Kientzle
_______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
