Notes on building my binary-packages:
Why?
Source patches are often inconvenient: maybe slow to build, multiple steps,
duplicate work on several machines (or hard to gather all files to use
on other systems), ...
What?
- shell script that can extract files and install
- easy-to-use
- back out to undo changes
- updates are logged
- cleans up after itself
- download site has digests (md5)
Steps
- check for prerequesites
- back up current files
- extract and install new files
- logs details
- displays message if other changes/steps are needed
Operations
- print description
- display summary of changes
- extract (unpack) and install
- list files
- extract single file
- extract (unpack) but don't apply (don't install)
- show requirements / dependencies
- clean up backups
Examples
- BSD/OS mods backed up /usr/X11R6/bin/XF86_Mono at
/usr/X11R6/bin/.mod/XF86_Mono.pre-M401-023.XFREE86.
Similar
- http://www.bsdtoday.com/2001/February/Features422.html
- http://www.jakemsr.com/openbsd/binpat/ (several different components; also does download of patch)
- http://www.fernhilltec.com.au/~adrian/OpenBSD/patching/ (uses source tree and automates patching)
- http://openbsd.rutgers.edu/openbsd/binarypatch (??)
Ideas
- use pax or gzip
- maybe shar
- use sh(1) (no perl or python needed)
Wed Mar 20 08:41:11 PST 2002