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Reintroduce a dedicated package format

Open klange opened this issue 2 years ago • 0 comments

In ToaruOS 1.2.x, backed by Python, we had a dedicated package format consisting of compressed tarballs with a JSON control file containing information on dependencies, package names, descriptions, etc. As we abandoned Python and gzip in the NIH project, this package format was dropped, and for a time the package management system was reverted to its pre-1.2 state of installing files directly. Eventually, the package system regained support for tarballs and then compressed tarballs with the introduction of our own inflate library. We also have a json library in C, plus a separate JSON parser for Kuroko, so the dependency chain for supporting similar "all-in-one" packages has returned.

The entire msk package manager could use a rewrite: It suffers from a number of issues related to how it downloads and unpacks tarballs, it relies on having an available terminal emulator to display progress, and it's still built around support for all of these weird "package" formats (raw binaries, tarballs installed to particular directories, etc.).

klange avatar Oct 22 '21 01:10 klange