Distributions

A distribution is a set of packages available on an URL and a description file packages.pkg. For an example, you can look at the VLE distribution.

How to use a distribution

To use a package distribution you have to add a remote URL into your vle.conf file (see the remote preferences of the vle.conf documentation. Be careful to add only URLs that you trust in. For example to add an URL of a distribution http://mydistrib/, update the following line:

vle.remote.url=https://www.vle-project.org/pub/2.0

With:

vle.remote.url=https://www.vle-project.org/pub/2.0,http://mydistrib/

Then you have to perform an update of the local view of the remote packages:

vle --remote update

To install packages from this distribution you can use the remote mode of the command line interface.

Content of a distribution

The content of a distribution should have the following structure.

$http://mydistribution/
  └─ packages.pkg          ; the package description file
  └─ mypkg1.tar.bz2        ; the first package of the distribution
  └─ mypkg2.tar.bz2        ; the 2nd package of the distribution
  └─ ...

The packages.pkg is simply the concatenation of the Description.txt files of the packages contained into the distribution (see packages structure). For example:

Package: mypkg1
Version: 0.1.0
Depends:
Build-Depends:
Conflicts:
Maintainer: John Do <jdo@company.net>
Description: An extension to build difference equation models
 .
Tags: extension
Url: http://www.vle-project.org/pub/2.0
Size: 0
MD5sum: xxxx
Package: mypkg2
Version: 0.1.0
Depends:
Build-Depends:
Conflicts:
Maintainer: John Do <jdo@company.net>
Description: An extension to build FSA models
 .
Tags: extension
Url: http://www.vle-project.org/pub/2.0
Size: 0
MD5sum: xxxx

The tar.bz2 files are compressed archives of the source code of packages. For the moment only source code is provided into distribution.