Setting up a PET repo

For anyone who has established a PET repository, or who plans to do so, this recent discussion is relevant:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=45036

It is not difficult!

It is possible to create a script that will trawl through a directory hierarchy and automatically generate a file in the new standard database format. In future, all PETs will have a 'pet.specs' file inside them which has the database entry for that package. For now, a script that trawls for pet packages and extracts all info it can find, will not be able to find everything it needs. For example, it could find a description in a .desktop file, but not if there is no .desktop file.
Then, dependencies are needed, something very important but often overlooked in pet repos.

Hmmm, maybe I should write a basic trawling script. It can generate the database file for you, then you would maybe have to fill in some empty fields. Then let me know the URL of the file and I can point the PPM to it.

As 4.3 is on the way, this should be attended to, if you would like your repo to be in the PPM.

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Comments

PET repo
Username: BarryK
A further thought. I could probably do all the work in writing a script. It would be the same as what I have already done, reading the Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and Slackware repos and generating the standard puppy database files. What I would need is detailed info on your database file/s, that my script can download. Furthermore, my script could spider through the online pet pkgs and extract any further information, though if my script is local it would mean downloading all the pet packages -- this would have to be done if your database does not have basic info like description and expanded size of package. An example, look at the Slackware site, it has a very convenient file 'PACKAGES.txt' with info on every package in the repo. I just have to download that file then parse it to extract what I need. Of course, if you were to maintain a file equivalent to 'PACKAGES.txt' but already in the standard puppy database format then that would be great.

Re 'PACKAGES.txt'
Username: BarryK
"Another note for PET package creators. If you use 'dir2pet' in the Woof-builds, which includes the upcoming 4.3, it pops up a GUI that asks for various info about the package, like deps, description, etc., and also gets whatever it can out of the package to fill in the fields, and a database entry is created. However, you can create such a database entry at any time, for any PET package. Look in the 'Utilities' menu, 'Petspec create pkg db entry' -- this pops up the same GUI that dir2pet calls.

Tags: woof