Debian, Ubuntu package categories

I have been making improvements to the 'category' field in package database entries, see recent blog posts.

I am continuing this, according to a strategy that I have had in mind since I first designed the package db format for the Puppy 2.x series.

Today there is just a little improvement, but significant. For puppies built from Debian, Ubuntu (and Raspbian) DEBs (binary packages), I have improved the assignment of an appropriate 'category[;subcategory]' field.

The problem has been that Debian/Ubuntu sometimes uses odd names for packages, which confuses the support/find_cat utility in Woof, that is mostly looking for the original package names.
For example, if I recall rightly, Debian renames 'pidgin' as 'finch'. Some other packages have odd numbers and letters appended (apart from the version number).
Also, packages are often broken up into several (or more) separate packages, each with a different name.

I have found a simple way around this problem.

Woof commit:
http://bkhome.org/fossil/woof2.cgi/info/c5f76a9101

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Comments

PPM Compression
Username: smokey01
Barry it would be nice if PPM could manage a wide range of compressions such as xz. Pets created in Fatdog can't be extracted in other distros because PPM doesn't recognise xz. For most parts, especially with binaries compiled for FD, this is probably ok, but with scripts like Right Clicks etc it would be good it PPM was more portable. I really like the improvements to PPM.

Tags: woof