nmke-de/fbi

Something halfway to a package manager

FBI

FBI is something halfway to a package manager. It allows the user to install programs from different sources and update them.

But why?

I like to try out a lot of software. Sometimes, this software is so novel or obscure that it can not be found even on the AUR. In these cases, I usually clone the source code and compile the program myself.

As a consequence, the number of git repositories (and sometimes code from other places) begin to stockpile on my disk, making maintenance somewhat difficult. This can be somewhat mitigates by a simple shell script like this one I wrote myself, but without storing information on how to build/compile these programs, this only goes so far.

FBI tries to solve this problem by not only fetching the source code, but also by calling make (and in the future, other build programs). This should make maintenance easier.

What about the name?

Fetch, Build and Install!

Security considerations

If you use this, be aware of what you install, from which sources!!!

Dependencies

Hard dependencies:

• Libc
• Linux (untested for other OSs)

Dependencies which are, in theory, optional, but recommended:

• curl
• git
• make

Build Dependencies

• A C Compiler

Build

Make sure to fetch the git submodules. Do this with git submodule update --init --remote.

Type make. To install, type sudo make install. It is recommended to set the FBI_WORKPLACE environment variable.

Usage

fbi [OPTIONS] <url>
# where OPTIONS includes the following:
#
# FETCH OPTIONS:
[|-git|-hg|-f 'custom command']
#
# BUILD OPTIONS:
[|-go|-haredo|-make|-vlang|-b 'custom command']
#
# INSTALL OPTIONS:
[|-cd-install|-go-install|-haredo-install|-make-install|-i 'custom command']

# alternatively, to update, this:
fbi update

fbi's Issues

Add signal handler for SIGINT during update

A graceful shutdown after SIGINT should kill all remaining child processes and end the update process such that the results can be seen.

Linking against musl

fbi can be linked against musl, but will not execute correctly.
Tested on Alpine Linux Edge and on Artix Linux with musl-gcc -static.