SEPP is another system which is somewhat similar in the sense that it
makes a big symlink farm and also allows multiple installed versions.  Any
idea how epkg compares to that?


On Wed, 16 Oct 2002, Jonathan Perkin wrote:

> I've been pondering this a while, and unsure if anyone else has or
> whether someone has been working on it at all..
> 
> The encap package manager[1] is based around installing all software
> packages under their own directory in a specific hierarchy.  It's
> something I use a great deal for locally-installed software as it keeps
> everything neat and tidy, and makes it trivial to keep multiple versions
> of software around and able to switch between them.  An installed
> package is symlinked back into the main hierarchy and available for use.
> 
> For instance, my packages live in /cache/local/encap (e.g. epkg-2.2.6)
> and are symlinked back into the /cache/local hierarchy so that:
> 
> lrwxrwxrwx   1 jonp     inet           28 Oct  3 13:54 /cache/local/bin/epkg -> ../encap/epkg-2.2.6/bin/epkg*
> 
> etc.
> 
> After the standard "./configure --prefix=/cache/local/encap/<package>-<rev>
> make && make install" dance, software is installed to the /cache/local
> hierarchy with a userland epkg(1) utility which creates the symlinks,
> checks for clashes and creates a log.  Deleting the software is simply a
> matter of removing the symlinks (which epkg(1) handles automatically).
> 
> I can see great benefits in merging this system into pkg_*, as it will
> greatly help having multiple versions of binaries/libraries installed,
> and also help the "make update" problem of re-installing everything if
> one single package lower down the dependancy graph changes.
> 
> There are issues, especially having everything symbolically linked
> (having to traverse those symlinks to get to real file for stat(2)
> information etc, and speed issues), but hopefully with the recent
> ld.so_elf updates the second shouldn't be that bad.
> 
> I'm willing to work on this, but need feedback as to whether it's worth
> starting, or whether anyone has already done some work in this area, or
> even if the pkg_* meisters have something cleverer up their sleeves for
> future development.
> 
> [1]:	http://www.encap.org/
> 
> -- 
> Jonathan Perkin - Internet Operations Engineer - BBC Internet Services
>