Managing third-party packages in 9front

Every now and then, news from the club I’m too cool to join, the plan9/9front community, pierces the veil of coolness and enters our normal world. This time, someone accidentally made a package manager for 9front.

I’ve been growing tired of manually handling random software, so I decided to find a simple way to automate the process and ended up making a sort of “package manager” for 9front¹. It’s really just a set of shell scripts that act as a frontend for git and keep a simple database of package names and URLs.

Running the pkginit script will ask for a location to store the source files for installed packages (/sys/pkg by default) which will then be created if non-existent.

And that’s it! No, really. Now you can provide a URL for a git repository to pkg/add.

↫ Kelly “bubstance” Glenn

As I somehow expected from 9front, it’s quite a simple and elegant system. I’m not sure how well it would handle more complex package operations, but I doubt many 9front systems are complex to begin with, so this may just be enough to take some of the tedium out of managing software on 9front, as the author originally intended.

One day I will be cool enough to use 9front. I just have to stay cool.