luet

luet-geaaru (fork) - Container-based Package manager

Luet is a multi-platform Package Manager based off from containers - it uses Docker (and others) to build packages. It has zero dependencies and it is well suitable for "from scratch" environments. It can also version entire rootfs and enables delivery of OTA-alike updates, making it a perfect fit for the Edge computing era and IoT embedded devices.

It offers a simple specfile format in YAML notation to define both packages and rootfs. As it is based on containers, it can be also used to build stages for Linux From Scratch installations and it can build and track updates for those systems.

It is written entirely in Golang and where used as package manager, it can run in from scratch environment, with zero dependencies.

Differences between upstream release

There are so many differences that it becomes challenging to create a list because after version 0.16.x the two projects get a different path. This is also the reason because probably in the near future my fork will be renamed with a different name. This fork has the primary scope to be used in Macaroni OS with specific requirements needed for a good integration with Funtoo Linux too.

For now, I will try to describe what are the major differences:

• the binary is been splitted, luet is the client installer normally used by users to install/remove packages, luet-build instead is used for build packages, create repos, etc.

• there is only one solver now that doesn't use SAT or QLearning. It's been totally rewritten from the version 0.30.0.

• i begin to rewrite the docker backend and use the tar-formers to manage the tar streams. The same library is now used to unpack the tarball and install packages. On installation, it's important to ensure that the unpacked files will be synced to the filesystem and so the tar-formers library forces a flush and sync to the filesystem, this decreases the installation speed. To speed up this there is a section on luet config that could be tuned based on the target system:

  # ---------------------------------------------
  # Tarball flows configuration section:
  # ---------------------------------------------
  tar_flows:
  #
  #   Enable mutex for parallel creation of directories
  #   in the untar specs. Normally this field must be
  #   set to true, the default value.
  #   mutex4dir: true
  #
  #   Define the max number of open files related
  #   to a single untar operation. Be carefour on
  #   set this option with a big value to avoid
  #   'too open files' errors.
  #   In a normal system this could be also 512.
    max_openfiles: 100
  #
  #   Define the buffer size in KB to use
  #   on create files from tar content.
    copy_buffer_size: 32
  

  FWIS, increasing these values to 200/300 max open files and using a buffer of 128 could improve performance but this depends on disk speed, hardware, RAM, etc.

• subsets feature: Permit to define subsets to choice what files extract from original package. This means that we could avoid splitting of a package, for example for Portage metadata, Include files, etc. and customize the subsets defined in the original package definition with custom options that could be configured from an user at runtime.

• annotations: the annotations are managed as interface{} struct without define only strings

• drop extensions and plugin support not used

• drop reclaim command.

• it supports packages mask like in Funtoo/Gentoo. This is a mandatory feature to permit different versions of the same packages and to avoid only the major version release being installed. In a similar way, the same happens when there are two packages supplying the same provides but only one is preferred.

Install

To install luet, you can grab a release on the Release page or to install it in your system:

$> curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geaaru/luet/geaaru/contrib/config/get_luet_root.sh | sh
$> luet search ...
$> luet install ..
$> luet --help

Build from source

$ git clone https://github.com/geaaru/luet.git -b geaaru
$ cd luet
$ make build

Documentation

Will be soon integrated with Macaroni OS documentation.

License

Luet is distributed under the terms of GPLv3, check out the LICENSE file.