Managing OpenBSD installed packages declaratively

Author: Solène

Date: 05 May 2022

Tags: openbsd

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Introduction

I wrote a simple utility to manage OpenBSD packages on a system using a declarative way.

pkgset git repository

Instead of running many pkg_add or pkg_delete commands to manage my packages, now I can use a configuration file (allowing includes) to define which package should be installed, and the installed but not listed packages should be removed.

After using NixOS too long, it's a must have for me to manage packages this way.

How does it work?

pkgset works by marking extra packages as "auto installed" (the opposite is manually installed, see pkg_info -m), and by installing missing packages. After those steps, pkgset runs "pkg_delete -a" to remove unused packages (the one marked as auto installed) if they are not a dependency of another required package.

How to install?

The installation is easy, download the sources and run make install as root, it will install pkgset and its man page on your system.

$ git clone https://tildegit.org/solene/pkgset.git
$ cd pkgset
$ doas make install

Configuration file example

Here is the /etc/pkgset.conf file on my laptop.

borgbackup--%1.2
bwm-ng
fish
fzf
git
git-annex
gnupg
godot
kakoune
musikcube
ncdu
rlwrap
sbcl
vim--no_x11
vlc
xclip
xfce
xfce-extras
yacreader

Limitations

The only "issue" with pkgset is that for some packages that "pkg_add" may find ambiguous due to multiples versions or favors available without a default one, you must define the exact package version/flavor you want to install.

Risks

If you use it incorrectly, running pkgset doesn't have more risks than losing some or all installed packages.

Why not use pkg_add -l ?

I know pkg_add as an option to install packages from a list, but it won't remove the extra packages. I may look at adding the "pkgset" feature to pkg_add one day maybe.

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