fakepkg - reassemble Arch Linux packages
Usage: fakepkg [ OPTIONS ] [ TARGETS ]
Pacman usually stores all downloaded packages in its package cache to enable the user to downgrade each and every package. However if the package cache was removed either by accident or by purpose to e.g. save disk space, it may be useful to recreate the cache at a later point. The obvious choice would be to download all those packages again. However this is actually redundant since all files and folders from the packages should reside on your system. This is where fakepkg comes in handy. Its purpose is to recreate any given package as long as it is installed on your system. This probably saves you a lot of bandwith and time in comparison to building the package from source or downloading it from third parties.
Warning: The files from your system are taken as they are, hence any modifications done to them by you or any program will be present in the assembled package. This might be seen as either downside or benefit. However distributing the recreated package is therefore discouraged. See ABS and Arch Rollback Machine for alternatives.
Note: Certain files and folders may only be read by root. Though fakepkg will warn you in those cases, consider running it as root.
Note: Reassembling packages may take some time, so be patient. However you may speed things up a little by using -j or XZ_OPT / ZSTD_NBTHREADS.
- -h,--help
-
Display this help message and exit
- -v,--verbose
-
Increase verbosity
- -j,--jobs <jobs>
-
Build in parallel - you may want to set XZ_OPT / ZSTD_NBTHREADS
- -o,--out <dir>
-
Write output to <dir>
- -r,--root <dir>
-
Use <dir> as an alternate root directory containing pacman db
PKGEXT sets the file ending of the reassembled package and implicitly the compression format.
XZ_OPT, ZSTD_CLEVEL, ZSTD_NBTHREADS, ... are honored by tar. Common usage scenarios are to utilize multicore compression. Maximum performace was achieved when used in conjunction with two jobs of fakepkg. However more than two active jobs may even lead to performance loss.
To reassemble e.g. gzip and binutils, use the following command:
fakepkg gzip binutilsYou may as well specify a destination folder:
fakepkg -o /var/cache/pacman/pkg tar xzRecreating multiple packages at once with only one thread can take some time. This can be sped up by utilizing multiple jobs, in this case 4:
fakepkg -j 4 linux slurm-llnl virtualbox qemuAlternatively it may also make sense to set the tar environment variable for multi core compression. Hereby tar uses all the CPU power hence starting multiple jobs brings no performance gain:
PKGEXT=".pkg.tar.xz" XZ_OPT="-T 0" fakepkg $(pacman -Qsq)Gordian Edenhofer <gordian.edenhofer@gmail.com>
Unless otherwise stated, the files in this project may be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version. This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See [version 2] (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html) and [version 3] (https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl-3.0.html) of the GNU General Public License for more details.