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Package management for non-system locations [message #2241]

Tue, 16 August 2005 19:09

Christopher Huhn
Messages: 88
Registered: December 2003
Location: GSI Darmstadt

continuous participant
super-utilisateur

From: lxdv17.gsi.de

Simon Lang, who coordinates the Hades software in /misc/hadessoftware, rose the issue of using a package management system for the software management.

After thinking about it for a while, I realized this problem might be tackled on a larger scale as it fits more use cases i.e. to clean up the software installation mess in /usr/local. Evil or Very Mad

I do not have any good solution yet, but these may be requirements for a package management system that installs to non-system locations:

Package installation shall be possible with normal user privileges
All parts of a software package must be installed below a single directory tree. No files should require to be installed in (/usr)/bin, /etc, /var or the like
Multiple versions of the same software shall be installed in different trees at the same time without interference/conflicts
The package database should also reside below this directory
Features as known from normal package managers should be available:
- List package contents
- List to which package a specific file belongs
- Tell if a file has been modified since installation
- Obey defined package dependencies
Maybe wishlist: allow interdependencies between different installation trees (maybe troublesome, but at least explicit)

My ideas on this matter by now are:

Maybe there exists a solution (at another HEP institute)?
Maybe dpkg can be modified to run no-root-privileges chroot or the like?
Tackle this problem with a version control system and make heavy use of tagging and trunking? This may solve at least some issues.
Maybe I install software you (we?) package into system locations instead? This is done by us anyhow, but multiple parallel versions of stuff are generally troublesome.

Did I forget something important?

What do you think?

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[Message index]

		Package management for non-system locations By: Christopher Huhn on Tue, 16 August 2005 19:09
		Re: Package management for non-system locations By: Christopher Huhn on Wed, 17 August 2005 11:11
		Re: Package management for non-system locations By: Christopher Huhn on Wed, 17 August 2005 13:21

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