Current Opkg Status

Thomas Wood thomas at openedhand.com
Thu Feb 21 22:07:46 CET 2008


On 21 Feb 2008, at 19:58, Paul Sokolovsky wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:40:54 +0100
> Michael 'Mickey' Lauer <mickey at openmoko.org> wrote:
>
> []
>
>>> Finally, thanks for starting on decent embedded package manager.
>>> And I hope that you considered different alternatives. For example,
>>> I last time pondered idea to prototype something in Vala. I mention
>>> this because I found ipkg code to be pretty dirty, and just clean
>>> up of it would take effort.
>>
>> This is actually a great thing, but at OpenMoko we found the need to
>> improve the existing package manager due to time constraints (isn't
>> it always like that?).
>
> Yes, always ;-). And my pondering was mostly of speculative manner -
> I don't have plans to start on that anytime soon ;-). Because Vala
> implementation wouldn't be w/o issues either. For example, it would
> need be linked statically with glib, and I doubt it would be less than
> 500k+ monster. And after all that, it would need to make people use
> such a completely new package manager, which is a task in itself. So, 
> if
> even big company selected to elaborate existing implementation, then no
> little guy in sober mind would invest into that ;-).

Why would it need to be statically linked? Personally, I would like to 
see opkg link to glib as it would help to clean up and optimise lot of 
the memory allocation and string handling code. Opke already links to 
two new libraries (curl and gpgme). Since glib is likely to be in the 
base installation of any modern linux distribution, I don't think it's 
a problem.

And please note I would not intend on including and gobject 
dependancies with libglib.

>
>> Personally, I'd welcome a clean start in Vala
>> though...
>>

I'm not sure what advantages vala would actually bring. I don't think 
object orientation is always necessary to  improve a piece of software. 
Sometimes keeping it simple is best.

Regards,

Thomas

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