upm: Universal Package Manager

Concept:

Wraps all known package managers to provide a consistent and pretty interface, along with advanced features not supported by all tools, such as rollback and pinning.

All tools will give you modern, pretty, colourful, piped-to-less output, and you'll only have to remember one consistent set of commands. It'll also prompt you with a text UI whenever faced with ambiguity.

It will also allow users to maintain lists of their favorite packages (and sync them to some remote server), so that they can automatically install them whenever they setup a new machine. (This can include git repos full of dotfiles/scripts, to give the user a comfortable home environment regardless of which OS they're using.)

Usage:

upm <command> <pkg>
up <command> <pkg>
u <command> <pkg>

Commands:

  • install
  • remove
  • build - compile a package from source and install it
  • search - using the fastest known API or service
  • list - show all packages, or the contents of a specific package
  • info - show metadata about a package
  • sync/update - retrieve the latest package list or manifest
  • upgrade - install new versions of all packages
  • verfiy - verify the integrity of installed files
  • audit - show known vulnerabilities for installed packages
  • pin - pinning a package means it won't be automatically upgraded
  • rollback - revert to an earlier version of a package (including its dependencies)
  • log - show history of package installs
  • packagers - detect installed package managers, and pick which ones upm should wrap
  • sources/mirrors - select remote repositories and mirrors
  • clean - clear out the local package cache
  • monitor - ad-hoc package manager for custom installations (like instmon)
  • keys - keyrings and package authentication
  • default - configure the action to take when no arguments are passed to "upm" (defaults to "os:update")

Any command that takes a package name can be prefixed with the package tool's namespace:

os:<pkg> -- automatically select the package manager for the current unix distribution
deb:<pkg> (or d: u:)
rpm:<pkg> (or yum: y:)
bsd:<pkg> (or b:)
ruby:<pkg> (or r: gem:)
python:<pkg>,<pkg> (or py: p: pip:)
go:<pkg>,<pkg>,<pkg>

...or suffixed with its file extension:

<pkg>.gem
<pkg>.deb
<pkg>.rpm
<pkg>.pip

Package tools to wrap:

  • Arch: pacman/aur/abs (svn mirror)
  • Debian/Ubuntu: apt-get/dpkg (+ curated list of ppa's)
  • RedHat/Fedora/Centos: yum/rpm
  • Mac OSX: brew/fink/ports
  • FreeBSD: pkg/ports
  • OpenBSD: pkg_add/ports
  • NetBSD: pkgin/ports
  • SmartOS/Illumos: pkgin
  • Windows: apt-cyg/mingw-get/nuget/Windows Update/(as-yet-not-created package manager, "winget")
  • Wine: winetricks
  • Ruby: rubygems
  • Python: pip/easy_install
  • Javascript: npm
  • Clojure: leiningen
  • Java: gradle
  • Erlang: rebar
  • Scala: sbt
  • Rust: cargo
  • R: cran
  • Lua: rocks
  • Julia: Pkg
  • Haskell: cabal
  • Perl: cpan
  • go: go-get

...and many more!

What it might look like:

Info:

acs

Log:

paclog

Rollback:

pacman-rollback

TODOs:

  • Use the pretty text-mode UI that passenger-install uses
  • Context-dependent operation
    • eg: if you're in a ruby project's directory, set the 'ruby' namespace to highest priority