fpkg

This name stands for foreign package!

And what is a "foreign package"?

That is how I call packages not available in the default distro repositories of a user. It can be from any source but those, although the script currently supports git-based sources only.

How does it work?

fpkg needs 2 files in order to run: the text file pkg.list and the directory ii/.

pkg.list contains a newline-separated list of all packages, and you currently have to register them manually. You can easily do this by running fpkg add.

The list contains the packages to check for update and also a key to check if the package needs to be pulled with --rebase or not. A kinda crap way of implementing it, but hey, it works! I'll try improving it in the future.

The ii directory contains little scripts written manually (with a template provided of course) for installing and uninstalling packages. Since not every package uses the same steps for building, that was the solution I came up with. fpkg add already redirects you to write those steps using your favorite text editor, though!

Requirements

You just need basic knowledge on Bash scripting, like knowing what variables are and that's it.

Besides that, you'll also need the following:

• awk
• coreutils
• sed

Nothing much, that 2nd item should be installed on every Linux system lol

Basic setup

1. Just put the script somewhere in your $PATH, I use /usr/local/bin/ on mine for example.

2. As for the directory containing all packages, you just change $FPKG_ROOT to whatever directory you want, and if doesn't already exist, fpkg will make it for you!

3. And for the text editor, it's also as simple. Change $EDITOR to your favorite text editor.

4. Then, run fpkg add to register and write the .ii's for all the packages you have on your $FPKGDIR.

5. And then, you can run fpkg update just to check if everything is working and if your stuff is up to date of course.

6. That's it, you're good to go! And don't forget to run fpkg help to get some extra stuff too!

Logging

This is used to track down the build process of a package, so that if something goes wrong, the user can just open the log file and find out.

On fpkg, logging works as follows:

• Two variables, $FPKG_LOG and $LOG_FMT are commented out. They respectively correspond to the location of the log file and the format of the timestamp on the log file.
• Those variables are commented out by default, disabling the logging feature. To enable it, just uncomment them.

I'm not sure if I keep it this way, it was the best I could think of.

Contributing

Any suggestions or issues? Open a new issue or make a pull request, that would be very appreciated!

And actually, I would say that just by using the script you're already contributing to this project :)