enhancing ipks

Hi all,

while I love ipkg (thanks for all the work Carl) I think is has some
serious shortcommings:

- no support to install into e.g. /usr or a CF drive mounted at
  /ust/local
- can not install packages that don't fit into the device twice
  (well, actually nothing that does not fit into the ramdisk)

I've seen, that there are hoocks to fix 1) in the current ipkg version.
I've an idea how to solve both, but I'm not good enough in sh programming
(yet?).

unfortunately my sollution for 1 & 2 would breake the current ipkg version:

- change the ipkg format to be just one .tar.gz. This should contain
  the files as if they were put into /usr and additionally the controll
  files in tmp/$pkg_name/
  (all meta data must be moved to a seccond file, probably the Packages
  file already contains all the required information)
- on the ipaq the /tmp /usr/tmp and possible /usr/local/tmp shoudl point
  to the same directory (on the ram disk)
- the postinstall script should be fixed to support one option:
  $install_path, the path the pkg was installed to (e.g. /usr or
  /usr/local)
- the whole ipaq setup must be changed to first check /usr/local and
  than /usr
- in this case you could mount your CF drive under /usr/local and use
  ipkg to install packages to it.

while this fixes 1 & 2 it has other problems:

- you can only use one CF card at any given time
- special care must be taken when adding/removing CF cards
  (don't know, but perhapes /proc/ide/hda/identify could be used to
  identify known cards ...)
- while a wget -O - foo_pkg.ipk | tar -xzOf -
  could be used to fatch a package that just fills the remaining
  storage, this would simply whipe any file with the same name
  (I don't know how JFFS2 handles moving of files, but perhapes the
  Journaling saves us there: when installing to /usr, extract to
  /usr/ipgk_install (on the same filesystem as /usr) and move to
  /usr after all clashes are resolved)
- if we can add/remove software by adding/removing CF cards, we realy
  need a way to add the software to the menu
- there might be other bugs/shortcommings of this aproace, I don't think
  of ...

(I mainly say this, because intimate, while beeing very nice is outdated
compared to familiar and dublicates packages already on the ipaq, ...
i don't need all the stuf on intimate but don't like debian (apt does
not work for me, and there is no documentation) ... whould like to add
some tools that don't fit my 16MB flash, but don't have a microdrive
(well I happen to have a 1GB microdrive, but still there might be people
for whome this is true) ...)

BTW: plaese bear with my, I'll be on a business trip till saturday and
     will not get to my email (my ipaq is still unuseable for this and I
     don't have a notebook :-( ) but want to kick off some brainstorming

If you think I'm all wrong, feel free to correct me,
    Goetz.