8.2. Gestion de paquets

Package Management is an often requested addition to the LFS Book. A Package Manager tracks the installation of files, making it easier to remove and upgrade packages. As well as the binary and library files, a package manager will handle the installation of configuration files. Before you begin to wonder, NO—this section will not talk about nor recommend any particular package manager. What it provides is a roundup of the more popular techniques and how they work. The perfect package manager for you may be among these techniques, or it may be a combination of two or more of these techniques. This section briefly mentions issues that may arise when upgrading packages.

Parmi les raisons de l'absence d'un gestionnaire de paquets mentionné dans LFS ou BLFS :

There are some hints written on the topic of package management. Visit the Hints Project and see if one of them fits your needs.

8.2.1. Problèmes de mise à jour

Un gestionnaire de paquets facilite la mise à jour des nouvelles versions au moment de leur sortie. Généralement, les instructions dans les livres LFS et BLFS peuvent être utilisées pour mettre à jour vers de nouvelles versions. Voici quelques points à connaître pour une mise à jour de paquets, spécifiquement sur un système en cours de fonctionnement.

  • If the Linux kernel needs to be upgraded (for example, from 5.10.17 to 5.10.18 or 5.11.1), nothing else needs to be rebuilt. The system will keep working fine thanks to the well-defined interface between the kernel and user space. Specifically, Linux API headers need not be (and should not be, see the next item) upgraded along with the kernel. You will merely need to reboot your system to use the upgraded kernel.

  • If Linux API headers or glibc need to be upgraded to a newer version, (e.g., from glibc-2.31 to glibc-2.32), it is safer to rebuild LFS. Though you may be able to rebuild all the packages in their dependency order, we do not recommend it.

  • If a package containing a shared library is updated, and if the name of the library changes, then any packages dynamically linked to the library must be recompiled, to link against the newer library. (Note that there is no correlation between the package version and the name of the library.) For example, consider a package foo-1.2.3 that installs a shared library with the name libfoo.so.1. Suppose you upgrade the package to a newer version foo-1.2.4 that installs a shared library with the name libfoo.so.2. In this case, any packages that are dynamically linked to libfoo.so.1 need to be recompiled to link against libfoo.so.2 in order to use the new library version. You should not remove the old libraries until all the dependent packages have been recompiled.

  • Si vous mettez à jour un paquet qui contient une bibliothèque partagée, et que le nom de la bibliothèque ne change pas, mais que le numéro de version du fichier de la bibliothèque décroît (par exemple le nom reste libfoo.so.1, mais le nom du fichier de la bibliothèque change de libfoo.so.1.25 à libfoo.so.1.24), vous devrez supprimer le fichier de bibliothèque de la version précédente (libfoo.so.1.25 dans ce cas). Sinon, en exécutant ldconfig (par vous-même via la ligne de commande, ou par l'installation d'un paquet) vous réinitialiserez le lien symbolique libfoo.so.1 vers l'ancien fichier de bibliothèque parce qu'il a une version « plus récente », puisque le numéro est plus grand. Cette situation arrive quand vous installez une version précédente d'un paquet, ou que le paquet change de pratique de nommage des versions.

  • If a package containing a shared library is updated, and the name of the library doesn't change, but a severe issue (especially, a security vulnerability) is fixed, all running programs linked to the shared library should be restarted. The following command, run as root after the update is complete, will list which processes are using the old versions of those libraries (replace libfoo with the name of the library):

    grep -l  -e 'libfoo.*deleted' /proc/*/maps |
       tr -cd 0-9\\n | xargs -r ps u

    If OpenSSH is being used to access the system and it is linked to the updated library, you must restart the sshd service, then logout, login again, and rerun the preceding ps command to confirm that nothing is still using the deleted libraries.

    If the systemd daemon (running as PID 1) is linked to the updated library, you can restart it without rebooting by running systemctl daemon-reexec as the root user.

  • If an executable program or a shared library is overwritten, the processes using the code or data in that program or library may crash. The correct way to update a program or a shared library without causing the process to crash is to remove it first, then install the new version. The install command provided by coreutils has already implemented this, and most packages use that command to install binary files and libraries. This means that you won't be troubled by this issue most of the time. However, the install process of some packages (notably Mozilla JS in BLFS) just overwrites the file if it exists; this causes a crash. So it's safer to save your work and close unneeded running processes before updating a package.

8.2.2. Techniques de gestion de paquets

The following are some common package management techniques. Before making a decision on a package manager, do some research on the various techniques, particularly the drawbacks of each particular scheme.

8.2.2.1. Tout est dans ma tête !

Yes, this is a package management technique. Some folks do not need a package manager because they know the packages intimately and know which files are installed by each package. Some users also do not need any package management because they plan on rebuilding the entire system whenever a package is changed.

8.2.2.2. Installer dans des répertoires séparés

This is a simplistic package management technique that does not need a special program to manage the packages. Each package is installed in a separate directory. For example, package foo-1.1 is installed in /usr/pkg/foo-1.1 and a symlink is made from /usr/pkg/foo to /usr/pkg/foo-1.1. When a new version foo-1.2 comes along, it is installed in /usr/pkg/foo-1.2 and the previous symlink is replaced by a symlink to the new version.

Environment variables such as PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, MANPATH, INFOPATH and CPPFLAGS need to be expanded to include /usr/pkg/foo. If you install more than a few packages, this scheme becomes unmanageable.

8.2.2.3. Gestion de paquet par lien symbolique

This is a variation of the previous package management technique. Each package is installed as in the previous scheme. But instead of making the symlink via a generic package name, each file is symlinked into the /usr hierarchy. This removes the need to expand the environment variables. Though the symlinks can be created by the user, many package managers use this approach, and automate the creation of the symlinks. A few of the popular ones include Stow, Epkg, Graft, and Depot.

The installation script needs to be fooled, so the package thinks it is installed in /usr though in reality it is installed in the /usr/pkg hierarchy. Installing in this manner is not usually a trivial task. For example, consider that you are installing a package libfoo-1.1. The following instructions may not install the package properly:

./configure --prefix=/usr/pkg/libfoo/1.1
make
make install

The installation will work, but the dependent packages may not link to libfoo as you would expect. If you compile a package that links against libfoo, you may notice that it is linked to /usr/pkg/libfoo/1.1/lib/libfoo.so.1 instead of /usr/lib/libfoo.so.1 as you would expect. The correct approach is to use the DESTDIR variable to direct the installation. This approach works as follows:

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make DESTDIR=/usr/pkg/libfoo/1.1 install

Most packages support this approach, but there are some which do not. For the non-compliant packages, you may either need to install the package manually, or you may find that it is easier to install some problematic packages into /opt.

8.2.2.4. Basé sur le temps

In this technique, a file is timestamped before the installation of the package. After the installation, a simple use of the find command with the appropriate options can generate a log of all the files installed after the timestamp file was created. A package manager that uses this approach is install-log.

Though this scheme has the advantage of being simple, it has two drawbacks. If, during installation, the files are installed with any timestamp other than the current time, those files will not be tracked by the package manager. Also, this scheme can only be used when packages are installed one at a time. The logs are not reliable if two packages are installed simultaneously from two different consoles.

8.2.2.5. Tracer les scripts d'installation

Avec cette approche, les commandes que les scripts d'installation accomplissent sont enregistrées. Il y a deux techniques que vous pouvez utiliser :

The LD_PRELOAD environment variable can be set to point to a library to be preloaded before installation. During installation, this library tracks the packages that are being installed by attaching itself to various executables such as cp, install, mv and tracking the system calls that modify the filesystem. For this approach to work, all the executables need to be dynamically linked without the suid or sgid bit. Preloading the library may cause some unwanted side-effects during installation. Therefore, it's a good idea to perform some tests to ensure that the package manager does not break anything, and that it logs all the appropriate files.

Another technique is to use strace, which logs all the system calls made during the execution of the installation scripts.

8.2.2.6. Créer des archives de paquets

In this scheme, the package installation is faked into a separate tree as previously described in the symlink style package management section. After the installation, a package archive is created using the installed files. This archive is then used to install the package on the local machine or even on other machines.

Cette approche est utilisée par la plupart des gestionnaires de paquets trouvés dans les distributions commerciales. Les exemples de gestionnaires qui suivent cette approche sont RPM (qui d'ailleurs est requis par la Spécification de base de Linux Standard), pkg-utils, apt de Debian, et le système de portage de Gentoo. Une astuce décrivant comment adopter ce style de gestion de paquets pour les systèmes LFS se trouve à http://www.fr.linuxfromscratch.org/view/astuces/fakeroot-fr.txt.

The creation of package files that include dependency information is complex, and beyond the scope of LFS.

Slackware uses a tar-based system for package archives. This system purposely does not handle package dependencies as more complex package managers do. For details of Slackware package management, see https://www.slackbook.org/html/package-management.html.

8.2.2.7. Gestion basée sur les utilisateurs

Cette méthode, unique à LFS, a été décrite par Matthias Benkmann et est disponible sur le Projet des astuces. Dans cette méthode, chaque paquet est installé en tant qu'utilisateur séparé dans les emplacements standards. Les fichiers appartenant à un paquet sont facilement identifiés grâce à l'identifiant de l'utilisateur. Les avantages et inconvénients de cette approche sont trop complexes pour les décrire dans cette section. Pour plus de détails, voir l'astuce sur http://www.fr.linuxfromscratch.org/view/astuces/gestionnaire-paquets-utilisateur.txt.

8.2.3. Déployer LFS sur plusieurs systèmes

One of the advantages of an LFS system is that there are no files that depend on the position of files on a disk system. Cloning an LFS build to another computer with the same architecture as the base system is as simple as using tar on the LFS partition that contains the root directory (about 250MB uncompressed for a base LFS build), copying that file via network transfer or CD-ROM / USB stick to the new system, and expanding it. After that, a few configuration files will have to be changed. Configuration files that may need to be updated include: /etc/hosts, /etc/fstab, /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/shadow, and /etc/ld.so.conf.

A custom kernel may be needed for the new system, depending on differences in system hardware and the original kernel configuration.

[Note]

Note

There have been some reports of issues when copying between similar but not identical architectures. For instance, the instruction set for an Intel system is not identical with the AMD processor's instructions, and later versions of some processors may provide instructions that are unavailable with earlier versions.

Finally, the new system has to be made bootable via Section 10.4, « Utiliser GRUB pour paramétrer le processus de démarrage ».