Nore’s FreeBSD Blog

Hi, it’s nearing the end of GSoC 2008 and I’ve updated my wiki ( http://wiki.freebsd.org/AndersNore/pkg_improved ) about the pkg_improved project and there are testing instructions for those brave enough. Please test and please report bugs. There are several new features to the pkg-tools and there are some speed improvements made. Lately I’ve been cleaning some of the code mostly fixing bugs and writing documentation in the form of man-pages.

Now the new date feature is doing something useful, I’ve added an option (-M) to pkg_info which compares installtimes of packages similar to the comparison of versions. So now you can do “pkg_info -M ‘*>2008 07 18′ ” and it will display all pacakges installed after the date YYYY MM DD, you can also use the -x or -X option with the -M option. I’m also planning to make use of this in pkg_delete so you can delete packages within date-ranges. Also pkg_convert will have an option so you can make the installtime of packages (who do not have a @comment DATE field) equal e.g., to the changetime of +DESC in /var/db/pkg/pkgname/ (which is correct for most packages). I’ve also decided to cache the installtime which makes this operation a lot faster than calling read_plist for every package to find the installtime.

I’ve also done some improvements to the ‘pkg_add -r’ progress indication output, which now displays the speed of the download as well as percentage progress.