[Libguestfs] Add support for slackware in supermin

[Mathieu Bouillaguet]

Hi Pino,

Thanks for your reply and details.

I started looking at the others package manager code and as I see it there
is one main problem to port supermin to slackware distro.

Slackware builtin package management tools (pkgtool and slackpkg) do not
manage package dependencies. There is no easy solution to solve this
problem.
There are third party packet manager which manage dependencies but they are
not supported and I don't personnaly use it.

It would be possible to make supermin install only the packages entered on
the command line by the user for slackware distro but maybe other tools
rely on the package dependency installation semantic.

What is your opinion about this ? How supermin is used by other tools like
libguestfs ?

Thanks for your reply

Mathieu
 Le 10 nov. 2014 19:06, "Pino Toscano" <ptoscano at redhat.com> a écrit :

> Hi Mathieu,
>
> On Sunday 09 November 2014 16:14:32 Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 08, 2014 at 02:27:49PM +0100, Mathieu Bouillaguet wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > What needs to be implemented to add support for slackware
> > > distribution in supermin ?
> >
> > hi Mathieu
> >
> > I'm on holiday at the moment and will give a more complete reply
> > when I get back.  In brief you need to be able to do a few simple
> > package database meta operations such as listing all files in a
> > package and listing the installed deps of a named pkg.  This pre-
> > supposes that slackware has such a packaging db.  Pino CCd can
> > give more details, and you can look at existing pkg systems in
> > src/*.ml.
>
> As Rich said briefly, supermin needs to be taught about the package
> manager running on Slackware.  supermin needs it to perform some
> operations on the system, such as:
> - query the basic information about a package (name, version, and all
>   the basic attributes such as epoch and architecture, if present/needed
>   to unequivocally identify a package later) given its name
> - get the last time the package system has "changed" (like after an
>   update, or having installed/removed some package); this is needed so
>   supermin can avoid querying the package system when the set of
>   installed packages has not changed since last time supermin was run
> - get the list of dependencies of a package
> - get the list of files of a package, marking whether a file is
>   considered "configuration file" by the package manager; usually this
>   is the case for files in /etc, which the admin can edit, and the
>   package manager carefully handles when updating packages providing
>   them
> - download and extract packages from the sources of the package manager;
>   this is needed so supermin can pick pristine copies of the files of an
>   installed package, usually to have unedited configuration files
>
> supermin supports already few package manager, and you can find in the
> src/ subdirectory their implementations: dpkg.ml, pacman.ml, rpm.ml.
>
> --
> Pino Toscano
>
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