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 better handled
by 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.

In handling any new hard dependencies added by the maintainer since 
the previous version of a package, pkg-get performs a sysup in the same 
manner as the original prt-get (i.e., new dependencies are not injected 
by default). Perhaps in future versions it will be the default to perform 
automatic injection of new dependencies, which is easy with binary packages
since there's no need to carry out the installation in any particular order.
In the meantime, you can check the output of
'pkg-get depends $mypkg | grep "\[ \]"'
for each package affected by a sysup, in order to see whether the 
maintainer has added new dependencies.

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