INTRODUCTION
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pkg-get is a package / repository management tool for CRUX Linux.
Syntax and features are very close to (often a carbon copy of)
the ones found in the port management tool 'prt-get'
by Johannes Winkelmann.
In fact pkg-get was developed as a prt-get/ports drop-in replacement
for systems in which it is preferable to handle binary packages instead
of compiling ports.


ARCHITECTURE
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The client machines sync metadata files (available packages,
readme files, dependencies, etc) from a remote server (http or ftp)
OR a local path.
Once the metadata files are on the client machine, the usual
operations of installing, removing, getting info on packages
are available.


QUICK START
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Server:
  A repository can be generated using 'pkg-repgen' in a
  dir containing packages. It will take a while since md5sums
  have to be calculated. Alternatively, you can pass one or 
  more arguments to 'pkg-repgen', indicating the individual
  packages for which metadata will be created.

Client:
  Adjust settings in /etc/pkg-get.conf, then use the 'pkg-get sync' 
  command to gather metadata from the server (if remote). You can now
  use the commands as described in the manual, e.g.:
    
    pkg-get info apache
    pkg-get depinst qt6-base
    pkg-get listinst

See the manual page for a detailed list of commands and options.


REQUIREMENTS
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For the client, nothing outside the CRUX 'core' collection
For the server, prt-get


LIMITATIONS
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The client and the server must be configured to use the same
pkgmk compression mode, otherwise the client will try to download
a tarball with the wrong suffix. This is only a problem if you sometimes
compile ports on the client machine and prefer a different compression mode
(better suited to its less-powerful hardware?). By allowing you to maintain
your client machine solely with binary packages, pkg-get makes the contents
of /etc/pkgmk.conf mostly irrelevant, so you can simply put a verbatim copy
of the server's pkgmk.conf on the client machine.

The pkg-get configuration file does not offer as many settings as the one
for prt-get. In particular, you cannot change "addcommand", "rmcommand", or 
"runscriptscommand"; these are hard-coded as /usr/bin/pkgadd, /usr/bin/pkgrm,
and /bin/bash, respectively. There is also currently no mechanism to respect
"preferhigher", when doing 'pkg-get diff' or 'pkg-get sysup'.

'pkg-get depends' and 'prt-get quickdep' do not handle more than one port,
unlike the corresponding commands in prt-get. Therefore it is not as
straightforward to preview the list of packages that would be installed,
before running a 'depinst' operation with multiple targets.

The limitation above would have been mitigated by a --test switch.
Alas, such a switch is also absent from the design of pkg-get. Use
the --test switch with prt-get itself, for the closest approximation
of previewing the outcome from a 'pkg-get depinst' operation.

'pkg-get dependent' does not support the --recursive option. Other
useful prt-get commands (grpinst, fsearch, deptree, listorphans, ls,
cat, edit, cache) have no counterpart in pkg-get. Of these omissions,
only the 'grpinst' command is of possible interest for binary package
management; the unimplemented commands and options are just as easily
delegated to prt-get itself. If you want a Perl implementation that does
provide these missing commands, consider the script written by user
farkuhar [1].

pkg-get only makes use of the hard dependencies listed by the port
maintainer, not any of the eager linking that might have occurred on the
build machine. As a result, 'pkg-get depinst foo' might omit some of the 
packages needed by 'foo'. User ppetrov^ has contributed some helper scripts 
to facilitate the fixing of these broken binaries; visit the site [2] to
download them.

[1] https://git.sdf.org/jmq/Documentation/src/branch/master/scripts/prt-auf
[2] https://github.com/slackalaxy/depsck