A brief summary of HAIKU's package management. | Haiku Project

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With the announcement of Ingo and Oliver’s contracts for package management, it is worthwhile to revisit how package management will function. When reading, keep in mind that this explanation will be condensed, simplified, and partially incomplete. Nonetheless, it will provide a general overview on how things will work. Each piece of software lives on the hard drive as a type of compressed archive. For this explanation, let us call that file a “package-archive”. That package-archive contains directory information for all of its contents. As an example, the settings file goes here, the binary there, etc.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmadia/2012-08-20_brief_summary_haikus_package_management/
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I think package management could be even more simplified by having the package file itself be the executable and mounted at runtime regardless of the directory it’s in. If a dependency is not met, the error points to the package manager to take care of it. Right now we have .hkpg files that are “mounted” at boot time to populate the system, a need for a watched directory etc…

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but then you could not have library-only packages as they are not executed directly

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