The Pnd Package Manager

[Sphinxter]

Seems so fucking simple and too obvious to me so I must be missing something huge here, my understanding is software will be managed two ways;

1) ipkg = the os, standard libs and most of the apps you expect to find in any linux distro
2) pnd = third party application packages, (such as games), that includes a method to step outside and augment the ilbraries provided by the above and are installed by simply copying a single file to card easier than klik n'run or zero install both.

and far as linux package managers go if you haven't killed anything with apt, dpkg or rpm you probably haven't been using them very much, they are all a far cry from perfect, flawed at birth and almost as bad as ms setup. There is nothing as far as I know to stop you from ignoring pnd and contributing your application to the angstrom tree and managing it with ipkg instead if you really dislike the whole no effort install concept.

 

[Vorporeal]

Seems so fucking simple and too obvious to me so I must be missing something huge here, my understanding is software will be managed two ways;

1) ipkg = the os, standard libs and most of the apps you expect to find in any linux distro
2) pnd = third party application packages, (such as games), that includes a method to step outside and augment the ilbraries provided by the above and are installed by simply copying a single file to card easier than klik n'run or zero install both.

and far as linux package managers go if you haven't killed anything with apt, dpkg or rpm you probably haven't been using them very much, they are all a far cry from perfect, flawed at birth and almost as bad as ms setup. There is nothing as far as I know to stop you from ignoring pnd and contributing your application to the angstrom tree and managing it with ipkg instead if you really dislike the whole no effort install concept.

There is a reason NOT to do that. If you decide to use ipkg, you're probably limited to an install on the NAND, which is not recommended. This means that any game updates will require writes to the NAND, and if the game needs to create temporary files, they'll probably also exist on the NAND. Preventing unnecessary writes to the NAND is a good idea.

Also, the way to "augment" the libraries built into the firmware on the NAND is to just package any needed, "non-standard" libraries in your PND along with your app and all other required data.

 

[Sphinxter]

Seems so fucking simple and too obvious to me so I must be missing something huge here, my understanding is software will be managed two ways;

1) ipkg = the os, standard libs and most of the apps you expect to find in any linux distro
2) pnd = third party application packages, (such as games), that includes a method to step outside and augment the ilbraries provided by the above and are installed by simply copying a single file to card easier than klik n'run or zero install both.

and far as linux package managers go if you haven't killed anything with apt, dpkg or rpm you probably haven't been using them very much, they are all a far cry from perfect, flawed at birth and almost as bad as ms setup. There is nothing as far as I know to stop you from ignoring pnd and contributing your application to the angstrom tree and managing it with ipkg instead if you really dislike the whole no effort install concept.

There is a reason NOT to do that. If you decide to use ipkg, you're probably limited to an install on the NAND, which is not recommended. This means that any game updates will require writes to the NAND, and if the game needs to create temporary files, they'll probably also exist on the NAND. Preventing unnecessary writes to the NAND is a good idea.

Also, the way to "augment" the libraries built into the firmware on the NAND is to just package any needed, "non-standard" libraries in your PND along with your app and all other required data.

I am in complete agreement as to best practices here, just need to change that to, "Nothing as far as I know outside of common sense and the size of NAND to stop you from ignoring PND". What game creates temporary files? Don't think I've seen that before but I don't get out that much. Assumed temp space would be in ram. Thinking if every game did that what a mess that would be.

 

[Vorporeal]

I think I've seen a few that do so (possibly unpacking a compressed data archive once, and leaving some files uncompressed as temp files), but I could be wrong. In any case, the main point was that if writes to the NAND can be minimized/prevented, it's a good idea to do so.

 

[dflemstr]

I think I've seen a few that do so (possibly unpacking a compressed data archive once, and leaving some files uncompressed as temp files), but I could be wrong. In any case, the main point was that if writes to the NAND can be minimized/prevented, it's a good idea to do so.

Any games I create (that probably will be written in Scala/Java) will need at least 4.8 kiB of temporary storage to extract native libraries, so y'all better be prepared for that!

Note, however, that just because apps are stored in PNDs, this doesn't mean that they will have some separate temporary storage location. They will still have to use /tmp.

The Linux kernel has tmpfs, so even if applications were to write to /tmp (which resides on NAND) the data probably would get loaded into RAM because that's how the kernel rolls. It would probably be good if we all would have /tmp on a separate partition (read: SD card), however, in case applications want to extract stuff beyond 256 MiB.

Oh, and also remember that it's possible to copy the entire NAND to a SD card and boot from that card, in case you want to use IPKG extensively, need some extra write cycles, want to use your /home/user folder (that resides on NAND, too, believe it or not! There are still loads of things that need to be fixed, it seems.) or stuff like that. Also note that other distributions like Ubuntu ARM and Fedora ARM (hopefully) will be available, so you'll have access to many different package distributions.

 

[WizardStan]

If you have to store temporary files, especially such tiny temporary files, can I suggest using /dev/shm? It's temporary storage that exists entirely in ram, shrinking and growing as needed.

 

[limestrael]

Concerning the SD card, I haven't been able to find this piece of information, but which filesystems will it handle ? I wish I won't have to use the blasting FAT! I don't expect ext4, but who knows...

 

[Vorporeal]

If you have to store temporary files, especially such tiny temporary files, can I suggest using /dev/shm? It's temporary storage that exists entirely in ram, shrinking and growing as needed.

shmfs grew into tmpfs (might have been as simple as a rename), which is what most Unix distributions mount /tmp using.

 

[dflemstr]

Concerning the SD card, I haven't been able to find this piece of information, but which filesystems will it handle ? I wish I won't have to use the blasting FAT! I don't expect ext4, but who knows...

You can put anything you want on there, but I wouldn't recommend ext3 or 4, since they constantly write to their journals and shorten the SD lifetime. But hey, if you want to, you can even set up a RAID-backed LVM2 system that uses disk encryption through dm-crypt and LUKS, and then use XFS as your file system. Linux is dynamic like that. I guess that any Windows computers you own mightn't like you very much if you do something like that though

Now please, don't go more off-topic, I'd really like to reserve this thread for the actual PND Manager