epkg /usr/local/ package management
I find myself installing things in /usr/local/ occationally. There is
a type of "package management" system exclusively for /usr/local/.
For folks who do install things in /usr/local/, you may be interested
in the following:
http://www-wsg.cso.uiuc.edu/duct/
and some more info can be found at
http://uiarchive.uiuc.edu/encap/
The first URL is a page where you can download "epkg" a more advanced
version of "encap," which is described in the second URL.
Encap package management basically takes precompiled binaries and
makes symlinks for you in the appropriate places of /usr/local/. It's
nothing that couldn't be done manually, but if you install something
largish or several packages in /usr/local, then it may help.
For example, an encap package is simply a tarball; typically it is
extracted into /usr/local/encap, making the following directories:
/usr/local/encap/<packagename>/bin
/usr/local/encap/<packagename>/man
/usr/local/encap/<packagename>/lib
Symlinks are then made from /usr/local/encap/<packagename>/bin to
/usr/local/bin and so on and so forth.
The definition is a bit sketchy, but if you're interested, check out
the web pages.
There is a distribution, Nomad (www.nomadlinux.com) based entirely on
this system, and the developing University of Illinois Linux distrib
is based on this.
I find epkg works great with dpkg -- the two never know each other
exist, and they never get in each other's way (so to speak). Epkg is
entirely /usr/local, and dpkg handles the rest.
I thought perhaps someone would find this useful, especially if you
play around in /usr/local often. I used it to install xemacs 20.3,
because xemacs 20.4 has the gpm console ctrl-z bug.
Just thought someone might be interested!
Reply to: