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TITLE : Package management in jhalfs
ADDED : $Date:$
BY : Pierre Labastie
1. INTRODUCTION:
There are several hints discussing package management for LFS, but
nothing under jhalfs. There used to be a patch for PACO that I cannot
find now. This is a modification, which allows to use a package manager
inside jhalfs. I hope it is flexible enough to support several package
managers. My implementation uses dpkg, from Debian, in a very crude way.
Debian has a sophisticated package management system, which I have not
tried to use here. For example, it should be usable with Pacman from
Arch Linux (http://www.archlinux.org), as far as I remember from my old
days with DIYL. I am sorry to say I have (almost) no experience with
rpm, so I cannot tell whether it would fit.
2. OVERVIEW OF THE SYSTEM:
For now, package management is only available for LFS. I plan to
upgrade BLFS tools, but nothing usable right now. The other flavours of
LFS do not seem very active, so there is no point in updating jhalfs
for them.
The first thing to do is to modify the install instructions of the
chapter 6, 7 and 8 of the book so that the installed files end up in a
directory other than `/'. We choose to call this directory by the name
of the executed script, and to put the path to this directory in the
PKG_DEST variable which is made available to the scriplets.
Almost all the packages have a way to redirect the destination of
the files they install at the `make install' stage with the variable
DESTDIR. Furthermore, the authors of the book have been kind enough to
flag the installation instructions with `remap=install'. This allows an
xsl stylesheet to find those instructions. Then, places where `make '
occurs (make followed by a space) are replaced by `make DESTDIR=$PKG_DEST '.
Places where the book instructions move files into their destination
are harder to deal with: it is possible to change all occurences of ` /' or
`>/' (beginning of absolute paths) to `$PKG_DEST', but you end up moving
files to non existent directories. There is no simple way to automatically
create those directories, because you have sometimes to use the full path
(instructions of the form `cp file dir') and sometimes only the dirname
(instructions of the form `cp file1 file2'). So I am conservative and
create a reasonable subset of the FHS hierarchy into the destination
directory. Empty directories should then be removed before packing the
binary package.
Supposing now that the scriptlets have been adequately modified, the
package manager installation instructions have to be added at the end of
chapter 5 and chapter 6. Furthermore, the administrative files and
directories have to be created during the `Creating Directories' and
`Creating Essential Files' stage. For all this, the user has to supply a
file in docbook format, with the necessary instructions and enough
information to download the tarball. A template is provided in the pkgmngt
subdirectory.
The last thing to do is to tell how to use the package manager. When
the binary package is ready, the scriptlets call a shell function named
`packInstall', which should pack the binary package and install it on the
system. Note that nothing has been done to manage configuration files,
which are ususally treated specially by package managers. Depending on
the book layout, it is sometimes possible to create those files afterwards,
and sometimes not, which means that you have to check them after each
upgrade. The user has to provide his own function. A template is provided
in the pkgmngt subdirectory.