infpi

infpi is a script for the University of Edinburgh's DICE system that makes installing programs from a tarball easier. The pi stands for 'program installer' rather than 'package manager' because it doesn't manage versioning, dependencies, uninstallation of programs, or anything really other than installation.

TODO

• search for lib dir as well as bin dir
• allow installing from .deb, ideally by searching the package lists

Installation

This command creates your ~/.local directory where per-user programs are stored, installs infpi to that directory and makes it executable.

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin && curl -L "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alecks/infpi/refs/heads/main/infpi.sh" -o ~/.local/bin/infpi && chmod +x ~/.local/bin/infpi

IMPORTANT: Add ~/.local/bin to PATH.

DICE seems to have a setpath command, but I haven't used this.

Add the following to your ~/.brc if you use bash, the default shell for DICE, or ~/.zshrc if you use zsh:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

If you wish to install libraries with infpi, you also want to update your LD_LIBRARY_PATH:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/.local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

This allows you to call programs directly like my-program rather than ~/.local/bin/my-program.

Usage

Copy the URL of a package tarball and run infpi <url>. This will download the archive and extract it into the relevant directories.

For DICE, you are looking for an x86-64 or amd64 Linux tarball.

Here is an example which replaces DICE's default kitty terminal with the latest version:

infpi https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/releases/download/v0.39.0/kitty-0.39.0-x86_64.txz

Or to download the latest version of neovim:

infpi https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/latest/download/nvim-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

Package structure

The script expects the archive to have at least a bin directory or at least one executable. In the case that there is a bin directory, all directories in the archive is copied into your ~/.local folder. If there isn't, and executable(s) are found, they are moved to the ~/.local/bin directory and you will be asked about the rest.

Overwrites

If there are conflicts, infpi will ask you whether to overwrite all files (a), select some files interactively (s), or overwrite none (n).

Uninstalling

If you wish to uninstall a program, infpi writes a log file to ~/.infpi/logs which you can use to see what was installed. You can then manually delete these files (but be careful not to delete anything shared by other programs).