Re: rolling your own package management

On 06/28/2012 01:32 PM, LM wrote:

> Thank you very much for sharing this.  It definitely answers some of
> the questions I had.

Certainly. The process for building "xorg" is more complicated, and is 
not reflected in the "options" file included.

>
>> With one or two exceptions, I don't do patches at all.
>>
>> When there's a snag in a package, usually someone else has found and
>> solved it before me. I am able to use the instructions in "Beyond Linux
>>   From Scratch" or the instructions in "Community Driven BLFS" as a
>> starting point for almost everything.
>
> I've been doing several patches.  I see a program and think it could
> be better with a certain change, so I make it.

Let me be more specific: with one or two exceptions, I don't usually 
have to write my own patches in order to a get a package to install in 
the way I want. Commandline options to configure and make and what-not 
usually do the trick, and when they do not, someone else contributing to 
(B)LFS or C(B)LFS has usually figured out this before me.

To your desire: running modified versions of programs, this I do. The 
package-users fork on github is very friendly to running my own patches. 
There is a "build" script which untars the source in the "src" directory 
and then looks for a "patches" directory with patches to apply
and applies any it finds.

A typical process is:

     root@rover: ~ # add_package_user "Foo Of Outerspace" foo
     root@rover: ~ # su - foo
     package foo:/usr/src/foo$ mkdir src
     package foo:/usr/src/foo$ ln -sv /data/sources/foo-1.2.3.tar.xz src/
     package foo:/usr/src/foo$ mkdir patches && cd patches
[ ... write patch, link patch, whatever ... ]
     package foo:/usr/src/foo$ vim ~/options
[ ... add extra configure options or whatever ... ]
     package foo:/usr/src/foo$ . ~/options
     package foo:/usr/src/foo$ build
     patching file foo.s
     configure...successful! (17 seconds)
     build...successful! (31 seconds)
     test...successful! (159 seconds)
     install...successful! (3 seconds)
     package foo:/usr/src/foo$ exit
     root@rover: ~ #

I also usually tar up the logs, delete the unpacked sources, and usually 
put the version and patch info in the package ~/.project file....

As I hope you can see, it's no harder to run patched versions of software.


> Of course, that means I have a lot to try to keep up with when a
> program updates to a new version.  However, if I want the system
> customized the way I like it, I don't see a way around it.

Many times I've seen my patches continue to apply cleanly to new 
versions of software, with only changes in line-offsets.  Of course, 
sometimes even a bug-fix version bump will require a minor re-work of a 
patch -- or perhaps even a major one. I agree, if you want to run your 
own patches which are not queued upstream, there's some maintenance 
burden ... that's probably okay.


> I've been talking to other Linux users at our local users group and
> it's slowly beginning to dawn on me that average users do not
> customize their computer systems to the extent I do.

Well, you might find that even the case with LFSers ... but I think this 
is a community with a higher density of people who like to run patched 
systems. I can only speak for myself, but I started down the LFS path in 
part because I couldn't figure out how to rebuild a package and get it 
installed correctly on an out-of-the-box distro a long time ago. I had 
written the (trivial) patch to add the behavior that I wanted, but I 
couldn't work through the build process of the program. That was the 
first step down the road of thinking that it wasn't enough for me to 
*use* open source, if I wanted to contribute, I had to be confident that 
I could build everything I was using.


If you decide that the package-users approach is for you, I think you 
might find the fork is handy. In particular, the "create_lfs_users" and 
the "chown_lfs_symlinks" make the transition from the temporary (C)LFS 
system to the final package-user-owned system much smoother.

And, I'd be very open to suggestions, or pull requests or whatever:

https://github.com/ericherman/package-users

Cheers,
  -Eric

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