pman

pman is a small, portable, cross-platform package manager written in Python.

Note

pman is not ready for use yet (alpha, core features are buggy and advanced features are not implemented yet)

Why another package manager?

As far as I know, there are no truly "cross-platform" package managers. apt, pacman, zypper, and the like only work well on Linux (although apt is also used in iOS jailbreaking) and brew only works on *nix OSes. pman is not only cross-platform, but it's also portable - you can move your installation (including repos and installed packages) across two machines very easily, and it will just work. Any packages that are cross-platform (for example, packages written in Python or Java) will even work across operating systems.

Installation (*nix)

Installation on *nix OSes does not require root permissions.

1. Download and extract pman to a directory with write permissions.
2. Add the directory containing pman, as well as the packages subdirectory, to your PATH.
3. Create a new environment variable called PMAN_PACKAGES containing the path to the packages subdirectory.
4. (Optional) Rename pman.py to pman

Installation (Windows)

Installation on Windows requires administrator permissions.

1. Download and extract pman to a directory with write permissions.
2. Run the command Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope LocalMachine in PowerShell as administrator.
3. Run the command Test-Path $Profile in PowerShell.
4. (if command returned False) Run the command New-Item –Path $Profile –Type File –Force in PowerShell.
5. Run the command notepad $Profile in PowerShell.
6. In the Notepad window that opens, add the command Set-Alias -Name pman -Value python3 <pman-path>\pman.py to the end, replacing <pman-path> with the path to your pman installation.
7. Add the packages subdirectory to your PATH.
8. Create a new environment variable called PMAN_PACKAGES containing the path to the packages subdirectory.
9. Restart PowerShell.

Features

• Load repositories and package lists from disk.
• Download and import package lists from servers.
• Download and update packages from servers
• Uninstall installed packages

Planned features

• Add repos from command line
• Only install packages meant for a certain OS/CPU architecture
• Option to update and then run packages (intended to update GUI of an embedded device before it finishes booting)

Design Goals

• Allow the same script to run on all supported OSes (Windows, GNU/Linux, etc...)
• Allow one repository to host packages for multiple OSes and CPU architectures at the same time
• System-wide (with root/administrator) or single-user (no root/administrator) package installation
• Only use libraries already in the Python standard library

Security Design

pman relies on HTTPS to ensure traffic is not tampered with. Routing traffic through HTTP only is not supported.

Security Goals

Also have pman verify GPG signatures on files to help prevent server-side tampering. Ideally public keys should be downloaded once, when we first see the repo in repos.json