Urpkg

Description

Urpkg lets you install programs in a safe and undoable way. It is especially useful to install program from source when no package from your distribution is available. It is then very easy to uninstall the programs you don't want anymore. Urpkg was originally inspired by the LFS Package user hint.

Urpkg works by creating a new user for each package it has to install. The package is then installed with the privilege of the new user. This prevents a new package from overwriting file from another package for example.

Features

  • Can be used with any installation methods, i.e not only a Makefile
  • Avoids a dangerous root installation of a program by restricting privileges to
  • what is effectively needed
  • Let you decide where you want to allow packages to have write access
  • Let you uninstall any program
  • Could also be useful to create binary packages in an automated way. For example, it can create Slackware packages
  • Tested on LFS, Arch Linux and Slackware 12.1, but should work on other distributions as well.
  • Public-domain software.

News

February 4th 2010: version 20100204

Released into the public domain.

March 28th 2009: version 1.9

Fixed a bug that would remove directories even though they were not empty.

March 21st 2009: version 1.8

Fixed infinite looping bug which appeared in Arch Linux.

March 21st 2009: version 1.7

  • Added arch linux PKGBUILD
  • Added DESTDIR option to CMakeLists
  • Documented documentation build dependencies
  • Fixed some bugs in the installation scripts

Documentation

Urpkg has a user manual. You can read the online version with one page for each node or with everything on one page

You should always refer to that online manual first before asking a question or reporting a bug.