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Bulk

Bulk is a super-simple packaging utility. It's similar to fpm_ but implemented in rust.

It does three things for you:

• Makes directory of files into deb package
• Maintains a number of repos (stable, testing...) from list of packages
• Updates your version numbers

.. _fpm: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

:Status: Alpha

Why?

Default packaging tools for debian are too complex. Also I wanted:

1. Simple to install zero-dependency tool (comparing to fpm_)
2. Experiment a little bit with reproducible packages (i.e. omit timestamps from a package)
3. Simple utility to maintain (multiple) repositories
4. Add tiny wrapper around vagga to actually build the packages for all distributions by single command

It turned out that all functionality I needed from fpm_ could be reimplemented in a night, so we have a new tool, ready for the new experiments.

Limitations

Bulk should be simple. While we may lift few limitation in future versions we don't aim to support all the features.

Limitations are:

1. No install scripts
2. All files owned by root and no timestamps
3. No devices, sockets, empty dirs and other possible habitants of tar/deb archive
4. Limited support of package metadata (focusing on common between different linux distributions)

Installation

Currently we provide static binary for x86_64:

wget http://files.zerogw.com/bulk/bulk-0.4.2.tar.gz
tar -xzf bulk-0.4.2.tar.gz -C /

Or you can install it with cargo:

cargo install bulk

This will install bulk in /usr/bin. Ubuntu packages will be available shortly.

How To Use

Build program and install to some directory, say pkg. Put some metadata into bulk.yaml. Then pack it into a debian package::

bulk pack --config bulk.yaml --dir pkg --dest-dir dist

And you will get a package in dist directory. You may find the example bulk.yaml in this repository.

Building Packages

Just a few examples on how to prepare things to be packaged. With autotools it looks like this::

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
rm -rf pkg
make install DESTDIR=$(pwd)/pkg
bulk pack --config bulk.yaml --dir pkg --dest-dir dist

Or with new cargo install::

rm -rf pkg
cargo install PACKAGE_NAME --root ./pkg/usr
rm pkg/usr/.crates.toml
bulk pack --config bulk.yaml --dir pkg --dest-dir dist

This way you may package crate from crates.io.

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License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (./LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (./LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.