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Welcome to the spackle wiki!

Spackle Specs

Create a local system at $HOME/local. (So you have a $HOME/local/etc folder for config files, $HOME/local/usr/bin for binary executables, $HOME/local/usr/lib for libraries, etc.)

Activating spackle tells your system about these new paths.

• add $HOME/local/usr/bin to $PATH
• setup MANPATH
• setup pkg-config path
• setup CFLAGS and LDFLAGS for compiling C code

Package Management

Update list of installable packages at $HOME/local/var/cache/spackle/sync

• ArchLinux official binary packages: download the core.db, extra.db, and community.db indices (these are tarballs of package desc and depends files.)
• ArchLinux build scripts (ABS): generate file list from ABS rsync server or svn repo
• ArchLinux user repo (AUR) scripts: generate file list from AUR git repo's cgit interface. (Alternative is to use aur3.org to download PKGBUILD tarball)
• Debian binary packages
• Debian source packages

Package cache

• Store built packages at $HOME/local/var/cache/spackle/packages
• Build source packages inside $HOME/local/var/cache/spackle/build

Package installation

• Installed packages have a folder at $HOME/local/var/cache/local/package_name
• Retain file list (for uninstallation) and package info at $HOME/local/var/cache/local/package_name/files
• Retain package info (version, description, dependencies) at $HOME/local/var/cache/local/package_name/desc
• If the package is installed as a dependency for another explicitly installed parent package, record the parent package name in $HOME/local/var/cache/local/package_name/installed_for

Package uninstallation

• Delete files listed in $HOME/local/var/cache/local/package_name/files
• Remove self from child dependencies
• Ask to remove children which are no longer needed
• Remove $HOME/local/var/cache/local/package_name

Dependency resolution

• Use a config file to ignore some dependencies like glibc for system libraries which are already installed.

Package hacking

• For binary packages of executables and libraries, try to use patchelf to modify the RPATH in the elf header so that the dynamic linker can find shared libraries in our '$HOME/local' folder.
• For C/C++ source packages set environment variables CFLAGS="-I$HOME/local/usr/include" CXXFLAGS="-I$HOME/local/usr/include" LDFLAGS="-L$HOME/local/usr/lib -Wl,-rpath,$HOME/local/usr/lib" LD_RUN_PATH="$HOME/local/usr/lib" Also consider trying to set rpath to a relative location $ORIGIN/../lib so that packages are redistributable to different users