"Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> writes:

> The existing ports collection is not actually that tied to the
> packaging tools, and I've already looked at what would be necessary to
> adapt it to my new envisioned packaging scheme - it would be trivial.

Cool.

> If anyone wants to help new packaging tools (which would, BTW, have
> support for multiple architectures in a single package), they could
> really give me a boost by writing or finding me an API for dealing
> with zip files.  I need to be able to read the directory for a zip
> file, delete entries, add entries under specific names (using a
> supplied buffer for the contents) and extract a given entry into a
> buffer.  With that, I could really go to town on the second phase,
> I've just been sort of stuck at the "fear and loathing" stage which
> comes from looking at the info-zip code, #ifdef'd for 47 different
> platforms. :-(

Why not use the old standard "tar" ?  Are you choosing zip because
you can delete the compressed entries without having to uncompress the
entire stream to get at them?

I have done some of what you need in the past.  The zip "directory" is
really rather simple to handle.

> > I'd like to be able to install into an arbitrary location, use symlinks
> > from /usr/local/... to where I put the package, and have easy package
> > removal.
> 
> Yep, got all that.

Cool again.

--Michael