HAI (Home Arch Install) - install packages without root account

Question

HAI, or Home Arch Install, can "install" and run Arch Linux programs from your normal user account. (Even if you don't run Arch Linux at all - see the config file.)
HAI's design is heavily inspired by Zero Install, but it uses Arch Linux packages instead of a new package format. This means you can make use of Arch's extensive package database, right now.
HAI follows the KISS and worse-is-better philosophies. HAI is implemented as a set of specialized bash scripts, with under 500 lines of code in total, so it's not that hard to read, understand and extend.
HAI doesn't really install the packages it downloads - it uses fakechroot and unionfs-fuse to fool the program you run into thinking it's installed in /usr.
Quick start guide:
1. Download HAI from http://www.smnd.sk/tomi/hai/hai-1.1.tar.gz . (The address might eventually change, so please don't link to it directly.)
2. HAI doesn't need system-wide installation. Just unpack it somewhere.
3. Put this in your ~/.bashrc file: "alias hai=~/your/directory/with/hai". This allows you to run hai without typing the path.
4. Run "./bootstrap" from HAI's directory. This downloads dependencies HAI itself needs. (You need FUSE already installed, though.)
5. Try it:
hai bwm-ng
hai frozen-bubble
hai pysolfc pysolfc-cardsets -- pysol
hai inkscape -- inkscape somefile.svg
# in general: hai (what packages to install) -- (what program to run)
HAI comes with a README.txt file. You really should read it, it's short and if you've read this far, you already know most of it.
I've been working on HAI for two months and it's finally reached a state bug-free and elegant enough that it satisfies my prefectionism. I developed HAI to scratch my own itch, but please tell me if you try HAI, or perhaps even find it useful! I'd also like to know about any bugs you experience or feature requests you might have. If you find something in the documentation that could use clarifying, tell me as well.
(Update 2010-05-11: hai-1.1 fixes a bug when downloading from AUR and switches from tar to bsdtar, because tar acts up when downloading xz-compressed packages. For now, bsdtar has to be installed on the local system.)
Last edited by Tomi (2010-05-11 10:35:44)

Answer 1

Oops, didn't notice your reply, tavianator. Thanks for the bug reports!
vercmp: That's what I get for assuming libalpm won't change its internal layout... it was working at the time of HAI's release. Thanks for the fix.
rsync: I use it to get the fakechroot PKGBUILD. I could download the whole ABS tree through http, but most of the time it would be a waste... I'll try to think of a compromise.
Using HAI on distros other than Arch isn't very streamlined, though this is something I hope to improve. The SYSTEM_CHECK in the config file needs changing. (It's a program that checks if a package is already installed on the machine.) This line should work (it was tested on Mandriva, which uses rpm too):
SYSTEM_CHECK='local sysver; sysver=`rpm -qa | grep "^\(\|lib\)$requestname" | sort | grep -o "[^-]*-[^-]*$" | grep -o "^[^-]*"` || true; [ "$sysver" ] && version-ok "$sysver" && true'
Update on rsync: The PKGBUILD is in http://repos.archlinux.org/wsvn/package … dl&isdir=1 too, but that link can easily change if Arch switched from websvn to someting else. I'd appreciate a second opinion whether to use rsync or this link.
Last edited by Tomi (2010-05-19 18:21:10)