These are the TODO items for the Haiku Package Management.

packagefs

• If necessary, add a caching mechanism to speed up mounting it.

Package Daemon

• Complete support for extracting and updating settings files: Merge support and user feedback are still missing.

• Add user notification/interaction support for initial verification (on start-up).

• Support packages being copied to the packages directory. Currently only moving works.

Package building

• Define packaging guidelines and create a tool to check packages against those.

  • Status: Here’s the wiki page defining the policy. It’s still a work in progress. haikuporter has some policy checking built in already.

Package kit/manager

• Add system update support.

  • Status: Mostly functional in pkgman (pkgman full-sync), but unsupported in HaikuDepot.

Boot loader

• Safe mode/recovery options:

  • Disable packages installed in home.

Package/package repository format

• Add localization support. More info.

• Add support for repository keys (public/private) and package signing/checksums, so that it is possible to verify that data retrieved from a repository have not been tampered with.

• Add package sizes to repository. Since there are plans to support xz (or other high-ratio formats) compressed uncompressed packages for download that are recompressed for installation, we probably need to discriminate between download and installation sizes.

• Add support for a faster compression format (e.g. lz4). As it turns out, the currently used zlib compression is rather slow (slower than reading uncompressed data from a slow HD).

• Add MIME info for types supported by packaged applications (and sniffer rules?) to the package attributes.

Miscellaneous

• Add MIME directory watching to registrar, so it can update the MIME DB caches when packages are de-/activated.

• Get rid of post_install scripts. Do that in the build system.

• Get rid of UserBootscript. Start the scripts in “~/config/settings/boot/launch” from Bootscript instead.

• Update Installer.