This article is cross-posted from Andrew Lindesay’s blog here.
Java technology has been moving forward much faster in recent years with more frequent updates. Java 17 Long Term Support (LTS) was introduced in September 2021 and will be followed by Java 21 LTS in September 2023.
With HaikuDepotServer (HDS) still on Java 11 introduced in September 2018, it was time to upgrade to 17 and then also make the transition from Spring 5 to SpringBoot 3 which was released in November 2022. Spring is a base technology for SpringBoot with SpringBoot providing more configuration and functionality by convention.
The Haiku operating system has a packaging system that leverages a clever file format called HPKG. This article provides a simplistic overview of how the file format is structured.
Installing and Uninstalling HPKGs
To get a package installed on their Haiku computer, a user would download a package file in a format called HPKG. The user would typically do this via the HaikuDepot desktop application or by using the pkgman command line tool. Once an HPKG file is downloaded and moved into place at /system/packages, the contents of the package appear read-only in the file system. An example file might be pe-2.4.5-8-x86_64.hpkg which would provide the necessary files for the popular Pe text editor to be used.
HaikuDepot displays icons through a number of areas of its user interface. Early in the history of the Haiku packaging system, there were very few packages and very few icons. HaikuDepot started off by downloading each individually from HaikuDepotServer.
Download as Tar then Unpack
Downloading each icon file individually was fine for a while, but as the package and hence icon count grew it became necessary to rework this system. HaikuDepotServer later provided the icons as a compressed tar-ball containing all of the icons. You can download this yourself. The tar-ball is unpacked on the Haiku computer into a directory and then the HaikuDepot application reads the individual files from the local disk system.
Software on a computing platform such as Haiku is typically distributed as a package. Without a packaging system it would be hard for users to install software and because software often depends on other software, the chain of dependencies would be difficult for a user to resolve themselves. To orchestrate the distribution and management of the packages, Haiku has a packaging system which consists of applications, online tools, on-host tools and software libraries. One aspect of the packaging system is the coordination and identification of repositories.
