Carbs Linux

August 2020 News Post

posted on Aug 03, 2020

We are having some stalls during this summer, as I am currently working on university-related stuff. Nonetheless, there are some important changes that I want to share in this month's post.

Carbs Packaging Tools

This month I have reworked kiss into a new package manager, now renamed as cpt. Updating kiss will now bootstrap the new package manager, so you don't have to manually edit your system. If you don't like the idea of this, you can look up the post-install script on core/kiss and apply the changes manually.

You will also need to rename your KISS_* variables to CPT_*. So, KISS_PATH becomes CPT_PATH.

The rework changes the previous commands on the package manager into standalone tools, and move the package manager functions to a library. This makes it easier for a user to import functions and variables from the package manager, and extend the package manager with their own intended way. Previously this required ugly hacks and workarounds to use the package manager functions. I will be making use of these changes to re-implement binary package management functions as well.

If you want to use the library on your script you can simply do this:

#!/bin/sh
. cpt-lib
(...)

There are obviously some clean-up and simplifications needed in this new tool-based package management method.

Docs

I have added documentation for the distribution, and finally updated the guide for installation. It is now almost complete. These docs can be installed to your system for online viewing. I will also add a documentation crawler similar to how werc works (but as an offline viewer). You can find carbs-docs from the repository. Currently, the documentation lacks but I will be adding new stuff. These will solely be distribution specific documentation and will not be a wiki-like source. If anyone would like to contribute to a wiki-like documentation source, I would happily re-open the distribution wiki. You can find the source on https://github.com/CarbsLinux/docs.

Re-opening the Carbs Linux server

Back in May, I had shutdown the Carbs Linux server due to financial issues, but I am slowly reverting to the self-hosted model. Back then, the git repositories were mirrored to GitHub, and the management was overall much more flexible. The server used to run Carbs Linux as well (that was fun and horrifying at the same time). Now, I will be relaunching the git server which will be the upstream source before August 5. You can switch your remote, but GitHub will stay as a remote nonetheless.

EDIT: The git-server is up!