Capman

Use ArchLinux's Pacman package manager to manage packages on Chrome OS.

The goal of this is not to be able to install the regular Arch packages, but to provide a distinct pacman repository of Chrome OS packages.

The crew repository contains repackaged versions of the Chromebrew binary packages. However, there is a lot of issues with missing or wrong dependencies in the original package definitions, so expect having to fix things manually.

Install

Run the following (it's safe, I swear, but please read scripts before running them):

curl -Ls https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Kalion2000/capman/master/install.sh | bash

Usage

See the ArchLinux wiki page on Pacman

Why

You might be wondering why use pacman instead of Crostini, Crouton or Chromebrew.

Here are a couple of motivations for this project:

• chroots are heavy in size since they have to bring in quite a lot of dependencies and sharing files gets a bit weird.

• Crostini is nice, but we already have Gentoo out of the box, why install another (lesser) distribution. Plus, not all Chromebook models support it.

• Chromebrew is also nice, but isn't without issues:

  • Files are installed as chronos, any user with terminal access ends up an administrator of the "system".

  • No true dependency tracking or orphan management, removing a package leaves its dependants in-place and unused libraries are hard to identify.

  • The Ruby DSL for packages and makes porting packages harder than necessary. Packaging additional build files such as patches is not easily doable and essentially resorts to hacks.

  • In addition to the Ruby issue, some packages are not declarative and depend on current system state. Check the php and glibc packages for exemples.

  • No way to express conflicts or provides between packages, this makes providing alternatives difficult.

  • To add to the previous point, no file ownership enforcement is made, files can end up belonging to multiple packages. No reference counting is made either, so files are removed as soon as one of the owning package is removed.

  • Some of the packages install files in $HOME.

  • Locally built packages cannot be easily shared or installed. Users are also unable to add multiple package sources.