hpk

Contents

• Introduction
• Package Format
• Design
• Status

Introduction

Hpk (HitchHiker Package Keeper) is a package manager designed for HitchHiker Linux and written in modern and safe Rust. It has been designed from the ground up to have a flexible and easy to understand interface, have high performance and have a logical scope in regards to managing the files on your system.

Package Format

Packages to be managed by hpk are zstd compressed Unix tar archives. The archive is intended to be extracted directly onto the target filesystem and so does not have a root directory. Looking inside a package archive will show a tree similar to the following.

.
├── package.ron
├── etc
│   └── hpk
│       └── conf.ron.new
└── usr
    ├── bin
    │   └── hpk
    └── share
        ├── doc
        │   └── hpk
        │       ├── package-format.md
        │       └── README.md
        └── man
            ├── man1
            │   └── hpk.1
            └── man8
                └── hpk-package-format.8

11 directories, 7 files

The file package.ron contains all required metadata about the package in ron format (Rusty Object Notation). Config files are installed with the extension .new if the file already exists, and are renamed with that extension removed if the package is being installed for the first time and no config file exists. This is in accordance with the KISS principle, and configuration is left to the system administrator rather than the package manager attempting to do so itself. A more thorough description can be read at package-format.md.

Design

Every attempt is made to make the package manager performant, including things such as:

• parallel processing of files during package creation
• file data is read into memory once during package creation. That data is re-used for tasks such as generating checksums and tar file nodes, as opposed to calling external programs which would have to open each file multiple times.
• similarly, since hpk imlements reading and writing tar archives, during extraction each file is read into memory, the data is checked against the recorded checksum, and then written to disk rather then requiring separate steps

All of the main data structures and functionality are implemented as a library, allowing for creation of alternate frontends to be written in the future. The vast majority of the data is exported rather than having secret, private API's that are not exposed in the library.

Provision is made for some nice modern features for a future graphical client. As an example, the package.ron file has an optional field to link to an AppStream metadata file, allowing for nice things such as screenshots in a mode App Store like presentation.

Status

Currently, hpk is in an early stage of development and is not ready for use. Perusing the cli options will show much of the intended functionality.

What's already working

• initializing a package specs file on the command line
• creating a package archive from a directory of files
• installing local packages
• installing remote packages
• resolving dependencies
• removing packages
• upgrading to newer package versions
• searching repositories for available packages
• listing installed packages