Show HN: I made a portable tar package manager

1 point

2 years ago

Hey there! A few weeks ago I found myself having to install the Discord client through a tar.gz archive. Nothing outrageous of course, or so I thought: Discord updates are mandatory and the client refuses to launch if you don't upgrade, which in this case means re-downloading, re-unpacking, and setting up the desktop links all over again every 2-3 weeks. There a re solutions to this problem of course, namely the AUR, Flatpak, Snap, etc. but these, in my opinion, are just band-aids: the official package is only available as tar.gz and besides, there's tons of software that's too obscure to be in these formats (either because the developers don't care, don't know how, or can't package it in a dozen different formats).

What I've made may not be the best solution, but in my opinion it may be about as good as it gets for installing these programs. Tarman can install packages from local archives, remote URLs, and using recipes (manifests) from repositories. Installed packages are stored in a known location (~/.tarman/pkgs on Linux) and the program is capable of automatically adding them to PATH (though for this, tarman itself must be in PATH) and/or to the user's applications, it does this by inferring (or asking the user for) the information it needs, thus removing the need for packages to include metadata specific to this PM (though this is supported). Once installed, packages can be updated directly using tarman with a single command. Tarman should also be very easy to port to other platforms and formats: I've written a common POSIX implementation that should thsu cover all compliant Unix-like systems, but more (such as Win32) can be added, and the same goes for archive formats: plugins can be written and installed to add support for these files and also change the download handler used by tarman.

Of course, this post is not meant to be marketing. I want to be very clear that this project is still in early development and is mostly for personal use. It is still missing quite a few features (e.g., packages may still leave artifacts/side-effects on your system even when you remove them since they may write to other directories - I'm working on a possible solution though), probably has a slew of bugs, and may be disliked by those who exclusively rely on established PMs on important systems from which they want and rightfully need stability.

If you're interested/curious, you can take a look at the project's GitHub page via this post's URL. Install commands for Linux and macOS are provided in the README. Comments, constructive criticism, issues, requests, questions are of course welcome. Cheers.