Reversing the mess that opie-aqpkg has made ....

[CestusGW]

Hi all;

I just decided to take the plunge and move my SL 5500 from running the default ROM to OpenZaurus 3.5.1, and I've got to say, I was initially impressed. It looked really slick, and I really liked the proper filemanager/shell included. Then I went to use the packagemanager, and my fortunes reversed. After looking on these forums, I found out that the opie-aqpkg alternative exists. "No problem!" I said, having survived the horrors of doing an LFS install on my own computer without a second computer to rely upon.

So I successfully pulled off portmap and replaced the package manager. I started to fully enjoy these wonderful 'feed' concepts, and the way it automagically hunts down dependencies for me

But then disaster struck. I wanted a web browser for my Zaurus, and tried to put on Opera. Much to my dismay, though, Opera didn't work (I just now found the symlinking trick). "Alright", I said to myself, "let's try out this 'Minimo' browser thingy". At that time, I didn't realize that minimo = mini-mozilla. I thought it would be like Opera, only smaller! *insert painful, forced laugh here*

I don't have an SD card for storage, and I went with the conventional 32/32 split of my RAM. I told aqpkg to install minimo. Suddenly a long, long stream of dependencies started flashing up on my screen ... "Alright, let it go" I thought. About two minutes later, I was looking at a frozen screen where the message "Storage space full" sat in between an attempt to configure two of about a dozen system libraries. One battery-switch toggle later (she wouldn't take any other kind of input!), I began to poke around on my now-stuffed Zaurus. I can recall libraries being installed like libatk, libxfreetype2 (or something like that), and pango. My package manager shows none of those as currently installed. Looking under /mnt/ram, surprise! Gtk+ is there (sorta). Going to my terminal and hitting in 'ipkg files gtk+' gets me "Gtk+ is not installed!"

So there you have it: aqpkg hosed my system by clogging me with about a bazillion semi-installed packages, and I have no way to pull them off w/out manually inspecting every freaking file in /mnt/ram. Can anyone provide me with a way to:
See what minimo was trying to install on my system.
Get a file listing for what each of those dependencies was trying to install
Auto-hose all those half-baked useless files.

As it stands right now, I've flashed about 3 or 4 times in the past two days, and I really really don't wanna go reinstall all my software over again (groan)

[zenyatta]

Erm... this illustrates why separate feeds for Opie and GPE would be useful. Minimo is intended to run under X11/Gtk+ whereas Opie runs on Qt/Embedded. In other words, the package is incompatible with Opie and intended for GPE.

The "standard" browser package for Opie is konqueror-embedded and it mostly runs without problems (though it started crashing on me recently).

As for cleaning up your system, try "ipkg-link list /mnt/ram" and see what comes up. The packages that show up should be removable with ipkg. For others, the only way I know of is quite painful (even compared to a complete re-flash & re-install). It involves doing the following for every such package:

1. take apart the ipk (either "ar -xf whatever.ipk" or "tar zxf whatever.ipk") in a temp directory
2. run "tar zxf data.tar.gz"
3. examine the extracted files & directories and manually delete their installed counterparts

In your place, I would probably re-flash :-( One tip for these "unstable" releases is to put repeated tasks into a post-flash script (mine is called post-flash.sh and sits in the same directory where my initrd.bin and zImage are). Of course, setting up the script is not exactly point&click...

z.

[CestusGW]

ARGH! .... well, thanks for the advice. I guess the package manager for OZ isn't in great shape as of yet as the installs aren't atomic and the program isn't very robust.

[Chaos]

the installs aren't atomic

Well, from the problems you described, they sound very much like an atomic bomb, so...

Joking about typos aside, OZ 3.5.1 is said to be very promising, but really not ready for normal use yet. I'd personally suggest you stick it out until OZ 3.6. Unless you want to re-flash and play with everything a lot.

[MrSquishy]

Wait a minute...

There are people out there that dont flash their zaurus 5 times a week?

Ozone quickly became my favorite tool after all the experimenting I put my zaurus through.

It seems that seperating the feed could be one of the easiest ways to help out those that do so much for the OZ project.  I'm sure they know that having GPE and Opie in the same feed is not pleasant for anyone.  Is there any (organized) way we can list packages for the GPE feed that could be moved?

If i'd quit messing it up by doing mean things to it, I'd say that 3.5.1 is a stable usable system (for me at least), and I really appreciate the steps they accomplished since 3.3.6pre1.

[zenyatta]

Is there any (organized) way we can list packages for the GPE feed that could be moved?

Well, OpenEmbedded is a very powerful build system and I would guess can't be too hard to create three additional "packages" in OE: core-feed, opie-feed and gpe-feed. Is there anyone familiar with .oe files who would care to comment?

If i'd quit messing it up by doing mean things to it, I'd say that 3.5.1 is a stable usable system (for me at least), and I really appreciate the steps they accomplished since 3.3.6pre1.

I second that. The real showstoppers have been tackled and now only a ton of annoyances remains  I just stayed over a week without re-flashing (and only flashed then to install Prboom into a clean system which, of course, didn't help).

z.

[Hrw]

we already have metapackages to generate separated feeds

[lardman]

But then disaster struck. I wanted a web browser for my Zaurus, and tried to put on Opera. Much to my dismay, though, Opera didn't work (I just now found the symlinking trick). "Alright", I said to myself, "let's try out this 'Minimo' browser thingy". At that time, I didn't realize that minimo = mini-mozilla. I thought it would be like Opera, only smaller! *insert painful, forced laugh here*

I always though it would be useful for ipkg to check for disk space requirements before starting doing a dependency chain (or even a single file for that matter); and probably also asking the user whether they want to install the whole lot.

@Chaos:

Joking about typos aside, OZ 3.5.1 is said to be very promising, but really not ready for normal use yet. I'd personally suggest you stick it out until OZ 3.6. Unless you want to re-flash and play with everything a lot.

This problem affects all ROMs which use ipkg. The problem is that the ipkg status file cannot be written at the end of the installation (or failed installation) so the packages don't appear to be installed (to ipkg or ipkg-link).

This is obviously a problem, and could be made 'atomic' by writing to the status file before each package installation is started (writing 'Install Ok not-installed' or whatever the status line is), then altering this once the installation is complete. At the moment the status file is not written until all the packages in a chain have been written (I think), and the package manager holds it open until it's closed (which means you'd better not try running ipkg from a terminal at the same time - therefore the status file could also do with implementing file locking). Note that you'd also need to copy over the file list for this to work, and this is an added trouble which would require space checks (but this should work okay as OZ uses a RAM based tmpfs to extract the files so you won't run into the same troubles as pdaXrom which runs out of space just extracting the data even before installing anything).

These are all reasonably easy fixes; I'm sure patches (or constructive comments to the ipkg maintainer) would be welcome.

Regards,


Simon

[zenyatta]

Hrw: I searched the OE wiki for "metapackage" with no luck. Can you elaborate? Or post quick instructions for building an opie-only feed in OE? Thanks.

z.

[alienz]

Just thought I'd chime in, cause I did something similar. Accidently installed something to root and it ate up all the space so statuses can't be written making it impossible to remove.

Of course trying to go through and find what was installed the next day is too time consuming so I'm just going to reflash.

I guess as a linux geek I enjoy this painful process. One of the reasons why I got a 5500 was principally to play around.

After a week of the Z I gotta say OZ 3.5.1 is the fastest ROM by far, very snappy and GPE is great as well.