Package Management

From RockWiki

To system administrators, a package is a set of program and data files which belong to an application or group of applications together with a description of the package and other metadata.

Package management allows administrators to install, update and remove packages, check installed packages for missing or modified files and query information about packages.

The ROCK Linux Build scripts generally generate one archive file for every package but if Package Splitting is enabled several archives are created each of which represents a logical group of files. For example the koffice package would be split into koffice:doc which contains all documentation (except man pages), koffice:dev for software development files (like C header files) and koffice for all other files.

Special software tools called package managers are used to handle these archive files. ROCK Linux can create archives in two different formats and has a package manager for each: mine for files with the .gem extension and bize for .tar.bz2 files. bize is faster than mine but can only install, update and remove packages. mine' can also query the contents of installed packages and list their version.

Both bize and mine can be used to work on installed packages regardless of the format they were before installation. You can also convert archives from one format into the other using mine.

rocket, the ROCK Network Package Manager, is built on top of mine and allows to: build ('emerge') packages from sources and install/update packages from pools of .gem files located on local and network storage. It is part of the mine package.