A New Package Manager
Mere Linux has been quiet for a few years. That wasn’t accidental. It started with dissatisfaction with pacman. pacman is a great package manager, and it serves the Arch Linux community very well. But three things kept gnawing at me: A build system based on Bash. The scripts that drive packaging can be slow, fragile, and difficult to extend with code that is testable and portable. True build isolation required external tools. I had already patched makepkg to avoid the problematic fakeroot utility and instead used Docker containers. This worked well, but it still required a fair amount of glue. Officially, package signing requires a GPG setup. I have never been a fan of GPG and wanted to use something lighter and more modern. I had actually patched pacman to use asignify, but that patch was rejected upstream, and reasonably so. It also wasn’t a direction I felt fully aligned with. So I paused. ...