Table of Contents

Porting Pkgsrc to Minix

This page is about the now-finished GSOC 2010 project. The living pkgsrc page is at Testing Pkgsrc.

About the project

Student: Gautam Tirumala [gautam (dot) bt (at) gmail (dot) com]
Mentors: Arun Thomas and Ben Gras
Branch Info: src.r7062.pkgsrc

About this page

This is the project page for the GSoC project 'Porting pkgsrc to Minix'. Following is a brief overview of the project and the roadmap. This page will also describe any progress made on the project.

Abstract

The current Minix package manager - packman - does not scale to managing the growing number of packages being ported to Minix. There is a need for a new package manager. Pkgsrc seems to be the favorite. Pkgsrc, the NetBSD package manager, has already been ported to several other platforms. This project aims to port pkgsrc to Minix.

Notes

The project can be divided into two parts:

Bootstrapping pkgsrc on Minix

Bootstrapping pkgsrc is done by running bootstrap/bootstrap script. Three things have to be done for this:

Moving packages into pkgsrc

For most packages this should only involve applying any Minix specific patches to the code and modifying the Makefile. Since pkgsrc already has a mechanism to apply patches, this should be straight forward for most packages. Also, for most packages, the order of porting does not matter because all libraries are currently statically linked. Note that the process cannot be automated as on one hand build.minix is a shell script with no special requirements about various build stages and pkgsrc Makefiles have specific targets for each build stage.

Misc Tasks

Resources