The history of *nix package management

Very few people will argue against the statement that Unix-like operating systems conquered the (professional) world due to a whole lot of strong points – one of which is package management. Whenever you take a look at another *nix OS or even just another Linux distro, one of the first things (if not the first!) is to get familiar with how package management works there. You want to be able to install and uninstall programs after all, right?

If you’re looking for another article on using jails on a custom-built OPNsense BSD router, please bear with me. We’re getting there. To make our jails useful we will use packages. And while you can safely expect any BSD or Linux user to understand that topic pretty well, products like OPNsense are also popular with people who are Windows users. So while this is not exactly a follow-up article on the BSD router series, I’m working towards it. Should you not care for how that package management stuff all came to be, just skip this post.

When there’s no package manager

There’s this myth that Slackware Linux has no package manager, which is not true. However Slackware’s package management lacks automatic dependency resolving. That’s a very different thing but probably the reason for the confusion. But what is package management and what is dependency resolving? We’ll get to that in a minute.

To be honest, it’s not very likely today to encounter a *nix system that doesn’t provide some form of package manager. If you have such a system at hand, you’re quite probably doing Linux from Scratch (a “distribution” meant to learn the nuts and bolts of Linux systems by building everything yourself) or have manually installed a Linux system and deliberately left out the package manager. Both are special cases. Well, or you have a fresh install of FreeBSD. But we’ll talk about FreeBSD’s modern package manager in detail in the next post.

Even Microsoft has included Pkgmgr.exe since Windows Vista. While it goes by the name of “package manager”, it turns pale when compared to *nix package managers. It is a command-line tool that allows to install and uninstall packages, yes. But those are limited to operating system fixes and components from Microsoft. Nice try, but what Redmond offered in late 2006 is vastly inferior to what the *nix world had more than 10 years earlier.

There’s the somewhat popular Chocolatey package manager for Windows and Microsoft said that they’d finally include a package manager called “one-get” (apt-get anyone?) with Windows 10 (or was it “nu-get” or something?). I haven’t read a lot about it on major tech sites, though, and thus have no idea if people are actually using it and if it’s worth to try out (I would, but I disagree with Microsoft’s EULA and thus I haven’t had a Windows PC in roughly 10 years).

But how on earth are you expected to work with a *nix system when you cannot install any packages?

Before package managers: Make magic

Unix begun its life as an OS by programmers for programmers. Want to use a program on your box that is not part of your OS? Go get the source, compile and link it and then copy the executable to /usr/local/whatever. In times where you would have just some 100 MB of storage in total (or even less), this probably worked well enough. You simply couldn’t go rampage and install unneeded software anyways, and sticking to the /usr/local scheme you separate optional stuff from the actual operating system.

More space became available however and software grew bigger and more complex. Unix got the ability to use libraries (“shared objects”), ELF executables, etc. To solve the task of building more complicated software easily, make was developed: A tool that read a Makefile which told it exactly what to do. Software begun shipping not just with the source code but also with Makefiles. Provided that all dependencies existed on the system, it was quite simple to build software again.

Compilation process (invoked by make)

Makefiles also provide a facility called “targets” which made a single file support multiple actions. In addition to a simple make statement that builds the program, it became common to add a target that allowed for make install to copy the program files into their assumed place in the filesystem. Doing an update meant building a newer version and simply overwriting the files in place.

Make can do a lot more, though. Faster recompiles by to looking at the generated file’s timestamp (and only rebuilding what has changed and needs to be rebuilt) and other features like this are not of particular interest for our topic. But they certainly helped with the quick adoption of make by most programmers. So the outcome for us is that we use Makefiles instead of compile scripts.

Dependency and portability trouble

Being able to rely on make to build (and install) software is much better than always having to invoke compiler, linker, etc. by hand. But that didn’t mean that you could just type “make” on your system and expect it to work! You had to read the readme file first (which is still a good idea, BTW) to find out which dependencies you had to install beforehand. If those were not available, the compilation process would fail. And there was more trouble: Different implementations of core functionality in various operating systems made it next to impossible for the programmers to make their software work on multiple Unices. Introduction of the POSIX standard helped quite a bit but still operating systems had differences to take into account.

Configure script running

Two of the answers to the dependency and portability problems were autoconf and metaconf (the latter is still used for building Perl where it originated). Autoconf is a tool used to generate configure scripts. Such a script is run first after extracting the source tarball to inspect your operating system. It will check if all the needed dependencies are present and if core OS functionality meets the expectations of the software that is going to be built. This is a very complex matter – but thanks to the people who invested that tremendous effort in building those tools, actually building fairly portable software became much, much easier!

How to get rid of software?

Back to make. So we’re now in the pleasant situation that it’s quite easy to build software (at least when you compare it to the dark days of the past). But what would you do if you want to get rid of some program that you installed previously? Your best bet might be to look closely at what make install did and remove all the files that it installed. For simple programs this is probably not that bad but for bigger software it becomes quite a pain.

Some programs also came with an uninstall target for make however, which would delete all installed files again. That’s quite nice, but there’s a problem: After building and installing a program you would probably delete the source code. And having to unpack the sources again to uninstall the software is quite some effort if you didn’t keep it around. Especially since you probably need the source for exactly the same version as newer versions might install more or other files, too!

This is the point where package management comes to the rescue.

Simple package management

So how does package management work? Well, let’s look at packages first. Imagine you just built version 1.0.2 of the program foo. You probably ran ./configure and then make. The compilation process succeeded and you could now issue make install to install the program on your system. The package building process is somewhat similar – the biggest difference is that the install destination was changed! Thanks to the modifications, make wouldn’t put the executable into /usr/local/bin, the manpages into /usr/local/man, etc. Instead make would then put the binaries e.g. into the directory /usr/obj/foo-1.0.2/usr/local/bin and the manpages into /usr/obj/foo-1.0.2/usr/local/man.

Installing tmux with installpkg (on Slackware)

Since this location is not in the system’s PATH, it’s not of much use on this machine. But we wanted to create a package and not just install the software, right? As a next step, the contents of /usr/obj/foo-1.0.2/ could be packaged up nicely into a tarball. Now if you distribute that tarball to other systems running the same OS version, you can simply untar the contents to / and achieve the same result as running make install after an unmodified build. The benefit is obvious: You don’t have to compile the program on each and every machine!

So far for primitive package usage. Advancing to actual package management, you would include a list of files and some metadata into the tarball. Then you wouldn’t extract packages by hand but leave that to the package manager. Why? Because it would not only extract all the needed files. It will also record the installation in its package database and keep the file list around in case it’s needed again.

Uninstalling tmux and extracting the package to look inside

Installing using a package manager means that you can query it for a list of installed packages on a system. This is much more convenient than ls /usr/local, especially if you want to know which version of some package is installed! And since the package manager keeps the list of files installed by a package around, it can also take care of a clean uninstall without leaving you wondering if you missed something when you deleted stuff manually. Oh, and it will be able to lend you a hand in upgrading software, too!

That’s about what Slackware’s package management does: It enables you to install, uninstall and update packages. Period.

Dependency tracking

But what about programs that require dependencies to run? If you install them from a package you never ran configure and thus might not have the dependency installed, right? Right. In that case the program won’t run. As simple as that. This is the time to ldd the program executable to get a list of all libraries it is dynamically linked against. Note which ones are missing on your system, find out which other packages provide them and install those, too.

Pacman (Arch Linux) handles dependencies automatically

If you know your way around this works ok. If not… Well, while there are a lot of libraries where you can guess from the name which packages they would likely belong to, there are others, too. Happy hunting! Got frustrated already? Keep saying to yourself that you’re learning fast the hard way. This might ease the pain. Or go and use a package management system that provides dependency handling!

Here’s an example: You want to install BASH on a *nix system that just provides the old bourne shell (/bin/sh). The package manager will look at the packaging information and see: BASH requires readline to be installed. Then the package manager will look at the package information for that package and find out: Readline requires ncurses to be present. Finally it will look at the ncurses package and nod: No further dependencies. It will then offer you to install ncurses, readline and BASH for you. Much easier, eh?

Xterm and all dependencies downloaded and installed (Arch Linux)

First package managers

A lot of people claim that the RedHat Package Manager (RPM) and Debian’s dpkg are examples of the earliest package managers. While both of them are so old that using them directly is in fact inconvenient enough to justify the existence of another program that allows to use them indirectly (yum/dnf and e.g. apt-get), this is not true.

PMS (short for “package management system”) is generally regarded to be the first (albeit primitive) package manager. Version 1.0 was ready in mid 1994 and used on the Bogus Linux distribution. With a few intermediate steps this lead to the first incarnation of RPM, Red Hat’s well-known package manager which first shipped with Red Hat Linux 2.0 in late 1995.

FreeBSD 1.0 (released in late 1993) already came with what is called the ports tree: A very convenient package building framework using make. It included version 0.5 of pkg_install, the pkg_* tools that would later become part of the OS! I’ll cover the ports tree in some detail in a later article because it’s still used to build packages on FreeBSD today.

Part of a Makefile (actually for a FreeBSD port)

Version 2.0-RELEASE (late 1994) shipped the pkg_* tools. They consisted of a set of tools like pkg_add to install a package, pkg_info to show installed packages, pkg_delete to delete packages and pkg_create to create packages.

FreeBSD’s pkg_add got support for using remote repositories in version 3.1-RELEASE (early 1999). But those tools were really showing their age when they were put to rest with 10.0-RELEASE (early 2014). A replacement has been developed in form of the much more modern solution initially called pkg-ng or simply pkg. Again that will be covered in another post (the next one actually).

With the ports tree FreeBSD undoubtedly had the most sophisticated package building framework of that time. Still it’s one of the most flexible ones and a bliss to work with compared to creating DEB or RPM packages… And since Bogus’s PMS was started at least a month after pkg_install, it’s even entirely possible that the first working package management tool was in fact another FreeBSD innovation.

Building a BSD home router (pt. 2): The serial console (excursion)

The previous post touched on the topic of why you might want to build your own router, discussed some hardware considerations and showed how to assemble an APU2 bundle. Now that the box is ready for use, we have to do something with it – but there’s a small problem.

People who want to play with inexpensive hardware love their Raspberry Pis. Those make a great little toy: Just attach a keyboard and a monitor, insert an SD card and you’re done. Power on the device and you can start tinkering. With the APU2 it’s not that much harder actually, but it works quite differently. Why? Take a closer look at its backc and you’ll see that the outer left port is not VGA as you might have thought when you saw it from a different angle. It’s a COM port. There are two USB ports which would allow to attach a keyboard (the board doesn’t have a keyboard controller, though, which means that wouldn’t be of much use). But how to attach a screen to it? The RPi offers HDMI output, the APU2 does not. No VGA, no DVI, no HDMI and no DisplayPort either!

So how to access this thing? Typing blindly? Of course not. This post is about the serial console and since they call the COM port a serial port, too, it’s not too hard to figure out what we’re going to use. If you were born after 1980 (like me), chances are that you’ve never used a serial console before. Or rather you might not know exactly what it actually is. Heck, the younger ones might not even have heard about it! So if you’re either old enough or for whatever reason have experience with the serial console you could skip a lot of the following text. If you know what the real TTYs were, what a terminal and a system console is, this whole post probably isn’t going to teach you anything new. But since there are more and more younger people around for whom this is entirely new territory, I’m going to explain not only what we have to do in case of the APU2 but also a bit about how this all came to be.

Once upon a time… in 2017

Huh, 2017? That’s this year! Exactly. But then this headline doesn’t make sense, does it? Trust me, it does. Consider this:

% uname -a
FreeBSD pc0.local 11.1-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 11.1-PRERELEASE #0 r319447: Fri Jun  2 03:47:52 CEST 2017     root@pc0.local:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64

% ls /dev/tty*
/dev/ttyu2      /dev/ttyv0      /dev/ttyv3      /dev/ttyv6      /dev/ttyv9
/dev/ttyu2.init /dev/ttyv1      /dev/ttyv4      /dev/ttyv7      /dev/ttyva
/dev/ttyu2.lock /dev/ttyv2      /dev/ttyv5      /dev/ttyv8      /dev/ttyvb

Here’s an up-to-date FreeBSD system and it has quite some device nodes that bear “tty” in their name. The abbreviation TTY means Teletypewriter (or “teletype” for short) and with that we’re speaking of a technology that has its roots far back in the first half of the 19th (!) century. As I stated in my first post about FreeBSD 4.11 and legacy systems: Once some technology is established and in use, it’s extremely hard to get rid of it again. And while it’s hard to believe that concepts from almost two hundred years ago still influence today’s Unix machines, there’s some truth to it.

So what is a teletypewriter? Think a classical typewriter first. One of those mechanical machines that allow to type text instead of writing it: You press a key and that makes a small metal arm swing and its end hammer against the paper. That end bears an embossed letter. Between this head with the letter (or rather: character) and the paper there’s an ink ribbon and thus your key press results in a readable imprint on the paper.

Man has long striven to be able to transfer information across a long distance. Morse code made it possible to encode text and then send a message e.g. via optical means like blinking light. The telegraph (from Greek tele + graphein = far + write) achieves the same goal, however by sending signals over a cable.

A simple teletypewriter combines both: Imagine a typewriter with all the usual keys but no paper that is connected to a remote device which has the paper feed, ink ribbon and so on but no keys. This second device is called a teleprinter. The big limitation to this is that the information flow is one-way only.

Where computers fit into this

Sounds familiar? Sure thing: The keyboard that you use essentially does exactly that! Now consider a more advanced approach where two teletypewriters that both have input and output capabilities are connected to each other. In this bi-directional use you can type something that the person on the other end can read as well as write an answer which then you can read (and write again).

It’s obvious how this supports distributing information across large distances. But what does all this have to do with the COM port? Please bear with me. The first type of computers were big and extremely expensive mainframe machines. It makes sense that not everybody would be allowed physical access to them. Thus you wouldn’t sit down before them and attach a screen and keyboard! Instead you’d use a teletype in another room to interact with it. You input any commands and get a response in form of the printed output. More sophisticated teletypes allowed saving input or output on punch cards or read them in again and send the data.

Whatever combination of gear that allows sending and receiving data to/from a computer is called a terminal. Bi-directional typewriters are sometimes referenced as “hard-copy terminals” (because they printed the output on paper). While it’s hard to believe, this procedure has been state of the art at some point in time. Obviously this is not ideal, wasting a lot of paper. Fortunately there’s a solution for this: Enter the electronic terminal! Those replaced the printing on paper with displaying on a screen.

Now this is much more of what we’re familiar with, just in a special machine that is connected to the actual computer in a different place. The great thing about those terminals was that they allowed for adding more and more exciting new features. The bad thing was that they added more and more exciting new features. Usually there was no gain in having those features on the client side only. The server side had to know about it, too. Before long there were a lot of terminals out there, all with nice new features but all incompatible with each other…

This sucked. If you had this expensive new terminal that was unknown to your computer however, you couldn’t use its additional features. Good thing that we don’t use terminals today! That makes this an issue of the past. Right, that is a good thing. But no, it’s not a historic issue. Yes, we’ve replaced terminals quite a while ago. But what did we replace them with? Today we use terminal emulators. Your *nix operating system comes with programs that (by default) use the keyboard for input and the screen for output and thus simulate… a terminal.

Terminal emulators

Those terminal emulators can emulate various types of physical terminals and have additional features of their own. So the problems are back (or rather: They were never really gone). How do programs know what features are available? That used to be really tricky (and often lead to discarding features that were not commonly available on all popular terminals…). Let’s take a look at my shell’s environment:

% env
TMUX_PANE=%2
TMUX=/tmp/tmux-1001/default,1164,0
TERM=screen
[...]

My shell is running inside the terminal multiplexer tmux which set the TERM variable to “screen”. GNU screen was a somewhat similar program and since tmux is compatible with it, it announces that terminal-wise it works like screen. What does this look like if I quit tmux?

% env
OSTYPE=FreeBSD
MM_CHARSET=UTF-8
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
DISPLAY=unix:0.0
[...]
SHELL=/bin/tcsh
WINDOWID=58720259
TERM=xterm
[...]

Here my terminal emulator claims to support the feature set that xterm is known for. I’m not using xterm, but my terminal emulator (terminator) is compatible with it. You probably know htop. I’ve just installed it to make two screenshots of it. This is what it looks like if I run it in my terminal emulator:

htop running with $TERM=xterm

Now let’s claim that we’re using another terminal type, shall we? I’m going to pretend that my terminal is an old, crufty vt100:

% setenv TERM vt100
% htop

Afterwards the application looks like this:

htop running with $TERM=vt100

The difference is pretty obvious – the vt100 did not support color output (among other things). Let’s be even more radical and simply not announce our terminal type to any applications:

% unsetenv TERM
% tmux
open terminal failed: terminal does not support clear

Tmux won’t even run (and htop would screw it all up badly since it obviously doesn’t handle that case properly)! If the terminal type (and thus its capabilities) are unknown, programs need to fallback to the absolute baseline of functionality that each and every terminal is known to support. And that’s disturbingly little… In this case tmux would be unusable because the terminal might not even be able to clear the screen! Yes, not even the seemingly most basic things were implemented in all terminals.

Imagine you’re the author of a simple *nix program. You were supposed to know what terminals existed and what capabilities they had – and to adopt your program to whatever terminal it ran on! Fortunately Bill Joy wrote termcap, a library that helped dealing with various terminals. This extremely important functionality (which originated in BSD Unix, BTW!) evolved over time. Today we have ncurses which does just about everything to make life easy when programming console applications.

(Serial) console

Which leads to the question: What is the console? The system console (or just console) is a device used to imput and output text. A PC’s BIOS offers a console, the boot loader does and the OS kernel does, too: It uses it to print out messages and to take commands. It’s present even when you don’t see it. A system might for example work in so-called headless mode which means that there is nothing attached to the console. Plug in a keyboard and connect a monitor and you can make use of the console.

Unix-like operating systems often configure multiple virtual consoles (also called: virtual terminals). We saw those when we listed the tty* nodes in /dev at the beginning of this blog post. Together those form your computer’s system console to which usually keyboard and screen are attached.

But you need not attach those two devices to the console. You can also attach a serial device to it which can then be used to transfer commands from and messages to another computer that is connected to the other end of the serial cable. Then you can use that other computer’s keyboard to type commands and its screen to read the output. A serial console is simply a console that can make use of a serial connection to redirect the console. If the BIOS of your machine supports it, you can use the serial console to control everything on that machine using another one over a serial connection.

If you’re completely new to it, this probably was quite a bit of information. However we’ve only talked about the very basics here! If you like to know more about how TTYs, pseudo TTYs, processes, jobs and even signals work, I recommend Linus Åkesson’s article The TTY demystified which is an excellent read. He explains much more in-depth how Linux does all this.

What’s next?

In the next post we’ll prepare a USB memstick and attach a serial console to the APU2 to update the firmware.