[BusyBox] ipkg as busybox applet

[Glenn L. McGrath]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005 19:35:23 -0600
Erik Andersen <andersen at codepoet.org> wrote:

> ipkg is used for more then just OE.  For example openwrt
> (uClibc buildroot2 derivitive build system targeting the
> Linksys wrt54g) uses ipkg packages, as no doubt do many
> other projects.

(completely off the top of my head)

At one stage i remember someome redoing some ipkg code based on a fork
of the busybox archiving code :)

I think ipkg now has the same structure as a .deb, so busybox dpkg-deb
might be able to unpack them, however the ipkg tool supports a legacy
format that uses .tar.gz instead of ar at the top level which i remember
got them in trouble with busybox due to non re-entrant busybox gunzip
code.

I think the ipkg binary has a lot more functionality than dpkg, its more
like a combination of dpkg and apt-get and apt-cache.

I dont think ipkg is necessarily better (or worse) than other packaging
systems, but its the closest there is to a standard for the embedded
community. So its worthy of consideration for that reason alone.

I imaging it would some space on embedded system due to merging ipkg's
networking and archiving code with busybox's.




Glenn