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  • 76 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • % pm -i | wc -l
    55
    

    That’s how many software I packaged myself. They are installed to /usr/local using an alternative package manager because I couldn’t be bothered with making an appropriate .deb.

    And as to explain how this alternate workflow is less complex, here’s how I go about installing a program:

    % git clone git://git.z3bra.org/human ~/code/human
    Cloning into '/home/z3bra/code/human'...
    remote: Enumerating objects: 53, done.
    remote: Counting objects: 100% (53/53), done.
    remote: Compressing objects: 100% (53/53), done.
    remote: Total 53 (delta 28), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
    Receiving objects: 100% (53/53), 9.35 KiB | 195.00 KiB/s, done.
    Resolving deltas: 100% (28/28), done.
    % cd $_
    % pack
    CC human.c
    LD human
    install -D -m 0755 human /tmp/tmp.rfnbLyIQOz/usr/local/bin/human
    install -D -m 0644 human.1 /tmp/tmp.rfnbLyIQOz/usr/local/man/man1/human.1
    
            > /tmp/human@0.3.tbz
    
    installed human (0.3)
    % pm -i human
    usr/
    usr/local/
    usr/local/bin/
    usr/local/bin/human
    usr/local/man/
    usr/local/man/man1/
    usr/local/man/man1/human.1
    

  • Talking for myself and not OP: What’s complex about apt and yum is the package format per se. The cli is very straightforward and “just works”, but whenever you want something that’s not packaged and need to package it yourself, you gotta fasten your seatbelt and prepare for the complex task of creating an RPM or a DEB package.

    I know there are tools to help with that, but I’ve created packages for many distros (Debian, CentOS, Alpine, Arch, Void and Crux), and rpm/deb are just way more complex to create than the alternatives.





  • I’ve been a crux user for over 10 years now. I switched to it from Archlinux because it uses a port tree system for packages (think of it as the AUR but for everything) and because the package “recipes” are very simple and easy to write.

    At the time I was packaging a lot of stuff on Arch and the PKGBUILD format felt too bulky, complex and constraining for my needs. I switch to crux and found one of the simplest distro out there, and sticked to it. It’s also the Linux distro that feels the most like OpenBSD, which is neat as well.

    Also the mascot.