Hi Jeremy,

The tool looks neat - but I have a few problems with the implementation
language - since neither perl or tk are in the base system distribution at
the moment, you'll have to compile the tool statically a la XF86Setup, and
that may prove to be a fairly cumbersome beast.

Having said that, it's a whole damn sight better than what we have at the
moment.

The tkpkg that was taken from the FreeBSD ports collection needed no
directory changes, because that is what used to be used on their CDs to
manage installation of what we would call binary packages. So it would just
have been executed in the same directory as all the binary packages were
located.

Cross-posted to tech-pkg, which is where we should be discussing this kind
of thing.

Hope this helps,
Alistair

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy C. Reed <reed@reedmedia.net>
To: current-users@netbsd.org <current-users@netbsd.org>
Date: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 3:17 AM
Subject: GUI package admin tool


>I am working on a package admin tool in perl/tk.
>
>> My plan is to write a tool for adding, removing and configuring NetBSD
>> software packages. Also, display all installed packages and package
>> dependencies -- and be able to check dependencies. And display package
>> descriptions. The tool should be able to build packages from the pkgsrc
>> tree or install from precompiled binary form (download or local).
>
>I need some advice: what would be a good way to build a list of available
>packages? Some ideas I have:
>
>- check if some config datafile is within fifteen days old; if it is older
>then use uname -mr and grab list of all binary packages (i.e.
>ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/1.4.2/i386) and parse it to build
>datafile of available software
>
>- build list of package names from /usr/pkgsrc/*/*
>
>- build list from CD (which I have not done or looked for so I don't know
>exact format)
>
>The old and non-working tkpkg (from FreeBSD) uses
> pkg_info -I -c [glob -nocomplain *.{tgz,tar.z,tar.gz,tar.Z}]
>I can't figure out from the script where it is looking for the files.
>
>I also read the manpage but I can't figure out the proper usage for -I
>-c. (Any examples/explanations?)
>
>By the way, here is an image of my start:
> http://pilchuck.reedmedia.net/tmp-1552959188/screenshot-1-20000821.png
>
>If there is a more appropriate mailing list, please let me know.
>
>Thanks,
>
>   Jeremy C. Reed
>   http://www.reedmedia.net/
>