APT and DPKG now in EasyOS

DPKG is a low-level DEB (.deb) package manager, whereas APT is a high-level manager, that knows about repositories and has automatic dependency resolution. Quoting from here:

APT is at the higher level, taking responsibility for dependency resolution, repository management, and other daily package management related tasks, whereas DPKG is more at the low-level, going ahead to install .deb packages, yet it has finer control but manual handling of dependencies.

DPKG was already compiled in OpenEmbedded, but I only included the 'dpkg-get' utility in EasyOS. Next release of EasyOS will have the full DPKG, and I have compiled APT in OpenEmbedded and that will also be in EasyOS. Also the 'xxhash' dependency.

Why? Well, I'm going to explore a new way to add more packages to EasyOS. The guys on the forum have been installing .deb packages successfully in Easy, so I would like to formalize that a bit, see if can handle dependencies, avoid clashes with the scarthgap packages.

I'm going to explore this new direction, after yesterday struggling with XBPS:

• Finding XBPS to be very frustrating — October 11, 2024

...those problems are a symptom of a combination of per-package updating and rolling-release model. Easy and the pups have SFS file updates, which are "atomic" and avoid the per-package update pitfalls -- which a rolling-release model makes much worse.

...that's my little rant. Moving on, will post about exploring this new direction.   

Tags: easy