Hi,
This post is very handwavy just to put the subject on the radar. If
you're not interested in handwaving, better not read further ;)
Given mato's experiments in making it possible to "rumprun" unmodified
software packages, we are starting to face a problem common in OS-land:
how to make it easy to use 3rd party software without having to compile
everything manually and track library dependencies by hand. The current
"quick and easy way to provide something usable" by managing rumprun
packages as separate github repositories will not scale either from a
maintenance or usability perspective.
Much like a regular packaging system, the rumprun packaging system would
offer a repository of prebuild software, and especially in the beginning
an easy way to create such a repository locally. This software would of
course be entirely cross-compiled, as is possible with some packaging
systems. The software would also be "cross-installed" into a
rumprunnable image with no support for altering the package
configuration. If you want to upgrade packages or change the
configuration, you rebuild the image and re-run it. Yes, it would be
possible to work in some sort of
poke-the-binary-and-live-upgrade-the-kernel nonsense, but let's aim for
the simplest solution, not the most complex one.
A packaging system could also push app-tools to be an expert-level
interface, while the packaging system would be the one for which the
user experience is optimized. That said, I'm not sure if it matters.
A related but not-immediately-relevant subproblem is how would you
create a rumprunnable image with multiple "executables". I think it's
safe to start with one executable being the goal and figure out the next
step after that goal has been reached. We just need to make sure
multiexecutable mode is at least theoretically possible with the hooks
offered by the packaging system.
So, summarizing the requirements of the packaging system:
1) established set of packages
2) cross-compile support
3) easy to build your local binary repositories from a *subset* of the
supported packages
4) cross-installation support, i.e. create image from {x} packages
5) at least theoretical viability for some crunchgen-like
multiexecutable mode
Does anyone know which existing packaging system would best suit the
goal? I think pkgsrc and xbps are at least seemingly viable candidates,
but as always, it's the details which matter.
Thoughts?
- antti
p.s. there's http://wiki.rumpkernel.org/Project-ideas%3A-packaging but
that's slightly different, since it's about splitting the rump kernel
itself into multiple packages. I think the packaging system for rumprun
would be simpler since the whole rumprun base system and development
toolchain would just be one package. In other words, the lack of hard
thinking which has prevented the packaging model outlined on the wiki
from materializing would not be a problem.
