The blindspot package manager

Most of the software running on my linux computers is managed by official or community maintained repositories or various 3rd-party package managers. However, especially for newer software projects it can take a while for a package to become available even when using the most popular distros. Additionally, a tendency I started to notice about projects built with a language producing statically linked binaries:

Because all you need is our binary somewhere inside $PATH anyways, just download this artifact here directly from our CI builds and you're good

I'm generally fine with this installation method, but it creates a problem: These binaries are not managed by anything on my system and therefore remembering when and how to update is cumbersome. They kind of live in a blind spot of my package manager(s). And this is how the idea for blindspot started! See it in action:

Features

• Install a package based on a browser download URL
• Detect GitHub repos and install from GitHub release asset
• Detect tar archives and common compression based on the filename and guide through extracting files
• Update packages simultaneously
• Revert a package to the previous version from before the update
• Uses user local standard directories for data and configuration, no root privileges required
• It's fast and has lots of emojis in the user interface

Installation

Github release

Download a release and run the init command that can install itself:

cd ~/Downloads # assuming you downloaded it there
chmod +x blindspot_x86_64
./blindspot_x86_64 init
rm ./blindspot_x86_64

This automatically creates the config file and installs blindspot into the current users local bin dir.

Cargo

cargo install blindspot
blindspot init --no-install

MacOS Users

On a test device the init command failed to find the binary dir on MacOS. I set it manually export BSPM_BIN_DIR=/Users/myuser/Applications/blindspot and then added this to $PATH. Since I'm not used to MacOS I can't tell whether this is just a misconfigured device or generally the case with MacOS.

Usage

The usage should not be too far off from what you'd expect from a package manager. View the asciinema to get the basic idea.

Help

Use the --help flag to learn about the various subcommands.

Configuration

blindspot works out of the box if at least your $HOME env var is set. Use the following environment variables to overwrite default behaviour:

Shell completion

Completions for the most popular shells are provided. Default is bash:

source <(blindspot completion)

Disclaimer

Do not run this software as root! There should be no reason to do so.

This tool is just a small hobby project and in no way trying to solve package management on linux as a whole.