foraget

A simple universal package manager for Unix-like systems

Background

Many of us move between operating systems often and need to remember commands for respective package managers. When you're on a Debian based system you might need sudo apt install emacs, if you're on Fedora you'd run sudo dnf install emacs while if you're on an Arch-based system, you'll run sudo pacman -S emacs. Learning about different package managers and their commands can sometimes be fun but may get difficult to remember.

foraget provides a simple, concise, easy to remember command-set to work with respective package managers available on the current platform to be able to search for, install, uninstall or run packages without having to remember commands for individual package managers. This means regardless of your setup, you'll always need to run foraget install emacs and foraget will do the rest for you.

Why the name 'foraget'?

I wanted to name it something that is easy to spell as well as remember. Getting inspiration from names of real package managers that often end with 'get' and realizing that this one is nothing but a package that forages over output from other package managers, I came up with fora(ge)t.

Installation

There are a few different ways to get foraget.

As a binary crate using Cargo

If you already have Cargo installed, foraget can be installed directly from crates.io using the below command:

cargo install foraget

Once installed, in order to update and get the latest version, install it with --force:

cargo install foraget --force

Uninstalling is also as easy as:

cargo uninstall foraget

As a native application package

Compile from source

# Clone project to local
git clone https://github.com/myTerminal/foraget.git

# Switch to project directory
cd foraget

# Install with `make`
make install

Uninstalling would need only a single command:

make uninstall

Re-installation is also possible with:

make reinstall

Through an existing package manager in your system

foraget will soon be available to install from your operating system's package manager.

How to Use

foraget can help you work with package managers without remembering commands for each of them.

Enabling additional package sources (Not implemented)

foraget can help you set up additional package sources and package managers for your current platform with a single command.

foraget init

Once the process is complete, it'll list down the additional enable software sources.

Searching for a package

Searching for a package across package managers and sources has never been easier. Just use the search command and provide a search term and foraget will find for packages with similar names across all available package sources.

foraget search emacs

Installing a package

Installing packages is almost as simple as searching for them.

foraget install emacs

As a part of the installation, foraget searches across all sources and provides a list of results to choose from. The selected package is then installed from the source that contains it.

Uninstalling a package (Not implemented)

You would have probably used foraget to install a package and may not be sure of how to uninstall it. foraget can help you with uninstallation as well.

foraget uninstall emacs

foraget figures out the package manager or source through which the package could be uninstalled.

Further help with commands

To learn more about usage, refer to manpage:

man foraget

External Dependency

foraget depends on fzf for a few features. Until implemented as a part of the installation process, you might need to install it manually.

To-do

• Implement uninstallation of a package