This new Package Manager... where can I read about what it is and how it works in Haiku?

I am not all that up to speed on this new package manager thing that Haiku now has.

Is there some reading material, for dummies, that explains what it is, how it works with Haiku, etc…

Last time I used R1Alpha4 I used terminal to use a command to install a sound driver as my computer at the time did not do sound so I did some alternative sound driver.

Is this update routine no longer the same in current builds on Haiku?

Is installing apps the easier now for dummies to install new or upgrade older apps withing Haiku?

TJ

in the current nightly images you found haikudepot the gui for the package management system of haiku. with this gui you can search and install programs, drivers and more with the needed dependencies.

informations about it you can find in the haiku guides or http://www.besly.de

for haiku alpga 4 you have the installoptionalpackage script in haiku or you can use the besly optional package installer (download and documentation on besly.de)

haiku guides: https://www.haiku-os.org/guides

optional package installer: http://besly.de/menu/search/archiv/sys/optional-package-installer_eng.html

The new packagesystem is really performant. So performance wise its really good.

There are some nice end user documentation:
https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications.html
https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/haikudepot.html

If you want to add some repositories you are bound to the terminal at the moment
once you followed this steps.
https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/daily-tasks/updating-system
you can painless updating your system … this works for me without problems
for nearly one year … approximatly doing one update per week.

There are also other repositorys you can add
like these here http://haiku.uwolke.ru/repo/ wich give you some cool java apps and stuff like scribus
or
http://clasquin-johnson.co.za/michel/haiku/repo.html

As written in the end user documentation the routine to update / install apps are different now… but still verry easy.

if you want to have a deeper insight of the packagemanagement you can read throught the blog
wich where written when it was implemented:
https://www.haiku-os.org/tags/package_management?page=2
or a even more technical insight:
https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/PackageManagement

Have fun… :slight_smile:

As the other folks have said, installing a (new format) package is now simply a matter of using HaikuDepot, or failing that just dragging the ‘hpkg’ file into /boot/system/packages.

However, the components of a package are not actually extracted into a directory anywhere where you can replace or even delete them. Everything is read-only.

So if you need to replace a driver, as you used to do, the procedure is a bit different. There is a directory within ‘system’ – “non-packaged” – which contains a duplicate of the system tree that is alterable. If you place your driver in the right place within that hierarchy, it will be found before the read-only equivalent and used.

If you have to actually remove a failing component, you need the “Blacklist” feature. It’s a bit complex, but you can find the details in https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/daily-tasks/blacklist-packages