opkg

[Erez <erezgeva2@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I have learned about opkg which is a fork of the ipkg,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opkg
Although it is here from 2001, I only recently learned about it.

The ipk package format with the opkg is used today by
http://openwrt.org/ and http://www.openembedded.org/.
The opkg is maintain at http://code.google.com/p/opkg/.

However the ipkg tools for building ipk packages can be found in openwrt
 http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/ipkg-utils-1.7.tar.gz
The original web site http://handhelds.org/  (of the ipkg project) is
down at the moment.

I guess some of you already familiar with this information, so I
apologies in advance.

The reasons I bother you with this is:
1) The ipkg format is the same as Debian package,
    The different is that ipkg final packaging is using gzip tar
instead of ar (with both gzip and bzip2),
       from the very simple reason. Busybox have tar but not ar!
(bzip2 is included with busybox, so I believe it can be used).
2) The opkg is not using perl! Perl is quite big for embedded.

As I understand opkg can use also Debian packages (providing you have
ar), but I did not test it myself.

In short opkg allows building small embedded devices using Debian
packages (or ipkg packages which are almost the same),
 which is a perfect small embedded Debian that can upgrade its
packages directly from Debian repositories! :)!

I think that it would be nice to add the opkg (GNU GPL v2) and ipkg
tools to the emdebian project.

A tool that convert deb to ipk and back like alien can be easily build
(in cases that is truly needed).

Thanks
  Erez