Major Overhaul: OpenWrt Adopts Alpine's APK as New Package Manager

Starting in November 2024, OpenWrt's snapshots and future stable builds will replace OPKG with APK for better package management.

12 comments

I had never heard of opkg. I looked it up:

opkg: Fork of ipkg lightweight package management intended for use on embedded Linux devices;

ipkg: A dpkg-inspired, very lightweight system targeted at storage-constrained Linux systems such as embedded devices and handheld computers. Used on HP's webOS;

Wikipedia has no dedicated pages for either of them. I guess they're quite niche.
- I've never seen it used outside of OpwnWRT. I assumed they made it specifically for it.
  
  There's some usage in reMarkable: https://toltec-dev.org/
  
  They version hasn't changed since 2011 if that tells you something.
  
  Opkg is available for buildroot and some other embedded frameworks
It was about time, opkg is the worst package manager ever.
As a long time OpenWrt user I'd say this is probably a change for the better, but I never had any real problems with opkg.
Hopefully it can actually preserve packages across updates which is incredibly annoying to have to handle manually.

EDIT: Just found about this attended sysupgrade package which should help until when/if the new package manager fixes the issue.
- The underlying tool is getting replaced in 23. The new tool requests the new image with the packages from the build server.
So it's a lot like apt, but with a huge name conflict.
He says it was unexpected but it's been being talked about on the GitHub for quite some time now. It was really just a matter of when they decided to do it.
- It is a hard switch
Great if true

You've viewed 12 comments.