Glacier – a simple package manager written in sh

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https://github.com/everest-linux/glacier

I’m currently developing my own distro. Everything’s going well until I realize I need a package manager. None of the options I checked out really interested me, so I figured I’d get started with shell scripting and make one myself.

The process is very simple:

  • User calls Glacier
  • Glacier asks user which package to install
  • Glacier fetches a tarball containing a package info file, scripts that Glacier executes to either install, update, or remove said package, the executable(s), and a copy of whatever license the program uses
  • Glacier unpacks the archive and executes the corresponding script (for example, executing glacier-install will execute the package’s INSTALL.sh script)
  • Glacier moves the package’s information file to /etc/glacier/pkginfo

Currently, there are only 3 packages in the repository (kinda sad lol), but I am working on packaging all the tools necessary to build the base system.

If possible, feedback on the following would be excellent:

  • I followed in xbps’ footsteps, hence why there are separate scripts for each operation, should I keep this or make it more similar to a traditional package manager?

  • Unlike a traditional package manager (pacman -S package), Glacier provides a prompt for the packages you want to install:

    glacier-install [ ? ] Enter package name:

Would new users find this too hard? (distro is focused on more advanced users so this might not be a problem at all) – Should I change where the package info files get sent?

submitted by /u/Lava709
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* This article was originally published here

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