[csw-maintainers] Tools to modify existing packages

Peter Bonivart bonivart at opencsw.org
Wed Oct 20 11:22:06 CEST 2010


On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 10:26 AM, Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski
<maciej at opencsw.org> wrote:
> I would like to edit an existing unmaintained package, and remove
> certain files that I believe shouldn't be there.  Something along the
> lines of: gunzip, transform, edit, update the REV tag, update
> checksums, put the thing back together, release.  Do people have any
> tools to do such open package surgery?

I recently described the steps for a user of pkgutil who needed to
edit pkginfo on some commercial packages.

# gunzip amanda.pkg.gz
# pkgtrans amanda.pkg . all (this will unpack the package)
# cd amanda (the package name just unpacked)
# vi pkginfo (edit especially NAME and VERSION fields to comply with CSW)
# ls -l pkginfo (note size)
# sum pkginfo (note checksum)
# vi pkgmap (edit size (column 4) and checksum (column 5) values of
pkginfo line)
# cd ..
# pkgtrans . newamanda.pkg amanda (re-assemble the package as newamanda.pkg)

In your case you will of course also need to remove the actual files
and corresponding lines in pkgmap.

/peter


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