Current Opkg Status

[Thomas Wood]

On Fri, 2008-02-22 at 00:30 +0200, Paul Sokolovsky wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:07:46 +0000
> Thomas Wood <thomas at openedhand.com> wrote:
> 
> []

> > 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.
> 
> Hm, yes, that's kind of old-school reasoning that package manager
> should be as self-contained as possible, so if during upgrade something
> goes wrong, then at least the package manager itself remains usable. But
> depending on more libraries for more functionality is unavoidable
> evolution I guess, so it indeed becomes blurred.

I guess for consumer devices (where Opkg is targeting), if something
goes wrong during an upgrade, the user is very unlikely to be able to
fix it even if they had knew how to use Opkg. It would obviously be
better if Opkg didn't make any mistakes in the first place!

Interestingly, libopkg.so is now ~530K, and I suspect plenty of that is
in implementing hash tables, linked lists, string utilities, etc.
However, for the time being, I'm resisting the temptation to link to
glib, just so I can focus on getting the important new features in.

[]
> 
> Sure, raw C always rules, if it's manageable ;-). Regarding Vala, I'm
> hinting at native support for Lists and Mappings, manipulating which is
> of course main internal work of package manager, so it should be fairly
> easy to make initial prototype, which yet could lead to something
> actually usable in real world thanks to compilation to binary. (There
> were talka about re-prototyping ipkg in Python before, for example, but
> usefulness of such implementation is doubtful.)

Well, since Vala get's all it's "built in" support from glib...


Anyway, to answer your original question, I'll take a look at the patch
you mentioned and have another think about it's implications.

Regards,

Thomas


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