The blindspot package manager

Most of the software running on my linux computers is managed by official or community maintained repositories or various 3rd-party package managers. However, especially for newer software projects it can take a while for a package to become available even when using the most popular distros. Additionally, a tendency I started to notice about projects built with a language producing statically linked binaries:

Because all you need is our binary somewhere inside $PATH anyways, just download this artifact here directly from our CI builds and you're good

I'm generally fine with this installation method, but it creates a problem: These binaries are not managed by anything on my system and therefore remembering when and how to update is cumbersome. They kind of live in a blind spot of my package manager(s). And this is how the idea for blindspot started! See it in action:

Features

• Install a package based on a browser download URL
• Detect GitHub repos and install from GitHub release asset
• Detect tar archives and common compression based on the filename and guide through extracting files
• Update packages simultaneously
• Revert a package to the previous version from before the update
• Uses user local standard directories for data and configuration, no root privileges required
• It's fast and has lots of emojis in the user interface

Installation

Github release

Download a release and run the init command that can install itself: bash cd ~/Downloads # assuming you downloaded it there chmod +x blindspot ./blindspot init rm ./blindspot This automatically creates the config file and installs blindspot into the current users local bin dir.

Cargo

bash cargo install blindspot blindspot init --no-install

Usage

The usage should not be too far off from what you'd expect from a package manager. View the asciinema to get the basic idea.

Help

Use the --help flag to learn about the various subcommands.

Configuration

blindspot works out of the box if at least your $HOME env var is set. Use the following environment variables to overwrite default behaviour:

|Name|Purpose|Default| |-|-|-| |$BSPMCONFIG|Location of the config file|$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/blindspot/bspm.yaml or $HOME/.config/blindspot/bspm.yaml| |$BSPMBINDIR|Where application binaries get installed to|$XDG_BIN_HOME/../bin or $XDG_DATA_HOME/../bin or $HOME/.local/bin| |$BSPMDATA_DIR|Where backup binaries for a rollbacks are kept|$XDG_DATA_HOME/blindspot/ or $HOME/.local/share/blindspot|

Shell completion

Completions for the most popular shells are provided. Default is bash: bash blindspot completion >> ~/.bash_profile . ~/.bash_profile

Disclaimer

Do not run this software as root! There should be no reason to do so.

This tool is just a small hobby project and in no way trying to solve package management on linux as a whole.