----------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT IS IT? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- xbps - xtraeme's build package system. It is a simple build package system that installs packages inside of a chroot in a destination directory. Once the package has been installed into this directory, you can make it appear/unappear at the master directory at any time. It's in spirit the same than GNU stow, but the files are just copied (there are no soft/hard links). xbps has been designed for Linux, and for the moment I'm not interested to make it work on any other random OS. I've been a NetBSD developer for some years and I do not want to come back... also the experience has helped to me to start xbps and not to use pkgsrc, which is very portable but also not so fast. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- REQUIREMENTS ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- xbps uses proplib, a property container object library and it's almost the same one available for NetBSD. Be sure to have it installed before using xbps. You can get it at: http://code.google.com/p/portableproplib/ I'm also the human maintaining the portable proplib package. I'd suggest you to install it into /usr/local to avoid issues with your distribution packages. Additionally the following software is required to be able to build and install xbps binary/source packages: * GNU GCC C++ * GNU Make * fakeroot * wget * libarchive (development package) * perl * sudo Super-user privileges are required as well, because all packages are built in a chroot (except the ones that are included in a virtual package to be able to build a minimal system for the chroot). PLEASE NOTE THAT fakechroot or fakeroot-ng DO NOT WORK. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ HOW TO USE IT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Before using xbps, some required utilities need to be built and installed into $(PREFIX); by default they are installed into /usr/local. You can do this by issuing "make" and "make install" as root in the top level directory. See the REQUIREMENTS section above for required packages. Once the xbps distfiles are installed into prefix, you can start building packages from source, add local repositories with binary packages, install or remove them, etc. If you are only interested in building/using packages from source, see the SRCPKG_INFO file. For information about binary packages, see the BINPKG_INFO file. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Juan Romero Pardines