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Comment by saidinesh5 | Hacker News Reader

I think the conclusion is more that package definitions can still be maintained on git/GitHub but the package manager clients should probably rely on a cache/db/a more efficient intermediate layer.

Mostly to avoid downloading the whole repo/resolve deltas from the history for the few packages most applications tend to depend on. Especially in today's CI/CD World.

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This is exactly the right approach. I did this for my package manager.

It relies on a git repo branch for stable. There are yaml definitions of the packages including urls to their repo, dependencies, etc. Preflight scripts. Post install checks. And the big one, the signatures for verification. No binaries, rpms, debs, ar, or zip files.

What’s actually installed lives in a small SQLite database and searching for software does a vector search on each packages yaml description.

Semver included.

This was inspired by brew/portage/dpkg for my hobby os.

yaml definitions compiled to sqlite sounds pretty similar to winget, which is scaling very well. vector search is a cool idea - how much storage does it use per package?

This is how WinGet works. It has a small SQLite db it downloads from a hosted url. The DB contains some minimal metadata and a url path to access the full metadata. This way WinGet only has to make API calls for packages it's actually interacting with. As a package manager, it has plenty of problems still, but it's a simple, elegant solution for the git as a DB issue.

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