[MiNT] opkg / coldmint

[Ole <ole@monochrom.net>]

Hello,

as you may know [1,2], I'm in process of providing an package
management / repository for FreeMiNT / ColdFire hich is based
on opkg.

This works reasonably well and it's an quite handy
build system.

However, the bad thing - perfomance of the client util
(opkg-cl - it's like apt-get, yum, rmp, dpkg ...) is worst case.

I thought this is an bug... but I found out, that it's
not hanging, but instead the single steps of the
installation process take so long. But especially
extracting the data files into an FILE* is taking much too long.

But all in all, it's not just this function ...
General perfomance is bad :(.

I found this is an interesting fact, and I wanted to
tell this :)

The strange thing is: rpm for example doesn't suffer
these performance problems - but opkg claims
to be an package management system for embedded
system...


Greets,
Ole

[1] - http://www.atariforge.org/gf/project/coldmint/

[2] - ACP Mailing list posting 26.10.2012:

Recently I had started to initiate an opkg/ipkg repository
for Unix tools and libs. It's based on optware (it's an fork), optware
is an package-repository for embedded linux devices.

It's very easy compile for different platforms and there is no
trouble with that as it is with the old RPM (where we have problems
producing packages like hello.v4e.rpm and hello.m68k on the same
system...). Otherwise it requires Makefile knowledge to add packages.

Currently this is work in progress, I'm adding more packages from
time to time - but I want to create an HOW-TO next time I'm working
on it - so the people with Makefile experience can add packages, if
they want to. Currently it only works for debian version of
Vincent's crosstools (and maybe native on FreeMiNT).

IPKG doesn't require to have an Buildsystem with Makefiles - that's
just how optware has done it. I can also be enough to simply provide
an build script...

On the firebee we have an opkg port which is able to install the
ipkg files produced by the optware buildsystem, or also other ipkg
files, manually created.

I'm using atariforge for all this. The project is called "coldmint".

Project page (also contains some wiki pages... and opkg download):
http://www.atariforge.org/gf/project/coldmint/

Repository Sources:
http://www.atariforge.org/gf/project/coldmint/scmsvn/?action=browse&path=%2Fcoldware%2Ftrunk%2F


Example Package Build script:
http://www.atariforge.org/gf/project/coldmint/scmsvn/?action=browse&path=%2Fcoldware%2Ftrunk%2Fmake%2Fnano.mk&revision=16&view=markup

(You see, it's not very clean... but optware provides us with initial 
Makefiles for 1000 tools... you mostly
have to replace some paths and configure settings)

Greets,
Ole