dragora/qi

Qi

Qi is a simple but well-integrated package manager. It can create, install, remove, and upgrade software packages. Qi produces binary packages using recipes, which are files containing specific instructions to build each package from source. Qi can manage multiple packages under a single directory hierarchy. This method allows to maintain a set of packages and multiple versions of them. This means that Qi could be used as the main package manager or complement the existing one.

Qi offers a friendly command line interface, a global configuration file, a simple recipe layout to deploy software packages; also works with binary packages in parallel, speeding up installations and packages in production. The format used for packages is a simplified and safer variant of POSIX pax archive compressed in lzip format.

Qi is a modern (POSIX-compliant) shell script released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. There are only two major dependencies for the magic: graft(1) and tarlz(1), the rest is expected to be found in any Unix-like system.

Requirements

• A POSIX-compliant shell.

• Graft for handling symlinks: https://peters.gormand.com.au/Home/tools Alternatively from https://rsync.dragora.org/current/sources/

• Perl in order to run Graft: https://www.perl.org

• Tarlz for produce binary packages: https://lzip.nongnu.org/tarlz.html

Optional but highly recommended dependencies (at run-time) are:

• ed(1), tar(1), unzip(1), gzip(1), bzip2(1), lzip(1), xz(1).

These recommended dependencies are to support the testing and unpacking of tarballs, as well as compressed files in these formats.

Other system utilities that are checked and expected by Qi are:

• awk(1), basename(1), chmod(1), cp(1), dirname(1), find(1), fold(1), grep(1), mkdir(1), mktemp(1), rm(1), rmdir(1), sed(1), sha256sum(1), stat(1).

Note

Take into account when you are going to install graft, you can define some macros like PACKAGEDIR and TARGETDIR. To be consistent, please use the same paths when configure adjusting them through the --packagedir and --targetdir options.

If you have not changed the default values used on the graft installation, you can avoid these steps, since qi uses the same values of graft for PACKAGEDIR and TARGETDIR.

Installation

To configure, make and install qi, type:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

See ./configure --help for more options.

To install qi in a different location, type:

$ make DESTDIR=/tmp/qi install

This is useful for package distributors.

Contact

The Qi home page can be found at https://www.dragora.org. Send bug reports or suggestions to dragora-users@nongnu.org.