coolpkg

coolpkg is a source level package manager inspired heavily by nix.

The project goals are as follows:

• Reproduceable builds always.
• Encourage users to curate their own custom/packaged package tree/repo, make this easy. (Package lists can be packages.)
• Forking a package and adding custom changes is just a single file copy. You could make a package to patch a package.
• Mixing versions of packages freely on the same machine, no dependency hell ever.
• Work on freebsd/openbsd.
• Different package trees per OS, don't force abstractions. Ok to depend on BSD base systems/compilers.
• Push self contained packages to other machines via ssh, even if they don't have coolpkg.
• Nix's power, just far far simpler in nearly every way.

Status

Prototype and proof of concept.

Getting started:

Add coolpkg and coolpkg-install to your path (requires python3).

Try the example:

Read the file example.coolpkg, hopefully it is quite simple.

run the command below to install the package and it's dependencies to ~/coolpkgstore/:

$ coolpkg-install ./example/example.coolpkg

This will do some cool things...

• Install a package set from a git url and install that as a package.
• Install go1.9 from that set, implicitly knowing to use go1.4 from the same set to bootstrap itself.
• Install some other fun software.
• Print out a 'virtual env' you can use for running the software.

How it works:

coolpkg-build hashes the package files and any arguments provided and uses that to calculate the install directory. The package is content addressed, if you change any aspect of a package, including it's dependencies, the install paths change, they never conflict and shared dependencies are shared.

package scripts are simply shell scripts with dependency information prepended.

package scripts have a simple contract, to follow - install into $out (currently ~/coolpkgstore/$HASH/), be reproducible by only using your listed dependencies (currently enforced by wiping $PATH).

Todo

• Implement the garbage collector coolpkgs-collect-garbage [rootdir...]
• Better isolation of builds, fewer stuff in bootstrap.coolpkg.
• Write the best documentation in the world. Show how to do atomic upgrades by building a set of symlinks as a package, then using mv to overwrite an old one.