Pako

The universal package manager library

Often, scripts need to install system dependencies using the native package manager of the user's OS. Typically, this is solved by having some bash script that runs apt-get, assuming the user is on Ubuntu. Smarter scripts use hand crafted code to detect the user's platform and aggregate a set of dependencies on a few of the more popular platforms. Our approach is different:

pako install libgdbm-devel sdl2-dev

On Ubuntu, this command will run:

sudo apt-get install -y libgdbm-dev libsdl2-dev

However, on Solus, this will run:

sudo eopkg install -y gdbm-devel sdl2-devel

It works as follows:

Parse package format (devel/debug/normal library or executable)
Look up package managers that exist in PATH
Format parsed package with common package convention of package manager

Installation

pip3 install pako

Usage

Command line:

pako (install|update) [package] [-t, --type format]

Python bindings:

from pako import PakoManager, PackageFormat

manager = PakoManager()
manager.update()
manager.install(['gdbm-dev', 'sdl2-dev'])
manager.install(['ssl-dev'], overrides={'eopkg': ['openssl-devel']})

Non-interactive mode

A no-confirm flag can be added to calls. This will be translated to the equivalent command line flag such as apt install -y.

from pako import PakoManager, PackageFormat

manager = PakoManager()
manager.install(['example-package'], flags=['no-confirm'])

Help Wanted

This tool can improve to fit a lot of use cases. Feel free to create an issue or pull request for new features and improvements. For instance, we need to figure out the best way to handle cases where a simple package format won't find the appropriate package.