Cross-architecture package installs
Tim Kientzle
kientzle at freebsd.org
Wed Feb 6 06:34:29 UTC 2013
I'm working on tools to build ARM system images.
Usually, these tools run on x86, which creates a problem
for packages.
I would like to install packages onto the image as it's built.
So I've been experimenting with variations of
pkg -c <DESTDIR> add <package files>
I'm running into a few problems but I think they can all be
solved. Only the first is critical; the rest are relatively
minor annoyances.
1) Pre-install/post-install scripts.
These obviously don't work since the DESTDIR
is for a different architecture.
At least for post-install, it should be possible to
record which packages still need their post-install
scripts run and arrange to run them after first
boot. I'm picturing an rc.d script that invokes pkg
with appropriate options to find all packages
that still need their post-install run and runs them.
This won't work for pre-install, but those are rarer
and we can hopefully work around them on a
case-by-case basis.
2) The chroot happens before opening the package files.
It's possible to work around this by copying all of the
package files into DESTDIR first, but that's both
time-consuming and rather awkward. (And quite
tricky if you're installing directly onto a mounted
image that has very little free space.)
It should be feasible to open the package files first
and then chroot. Then the actual installation still
happens entirely inside DESTDIR.
3) Bogus "failed to install" messages.
As far as I can tell, if "bar" depends on "foo", then
"pkg add bar foo" will do this:
Installing bar …
Installing foo …
done
done
Installing foo … foo already installed.
Failed to install the following package: foo.
This is surprising since foo did in fact get installed.
In my case, I want to say "pkg add *" and just have
it DTRT. It mostly does get the ordering right (I'm impressed!)
but the error message is a bit odd.
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