[Raion]

After reviewing a significant amount of information on various attempts at IRIX package management, and better understanding our limitations, here's my thoughts on what we should try next:

Recreating inst/swmgr as a FOSS drop-in replacement. There's a few reasons behind this line of thinking and thus hopefully I can help explain the rationale behind it:

Some users have recently ported RPM to IRIX, with the intention of making it easier to port software into IRIX. Let me underscore that I think this is not a bad thing, but I think that brings in a few challenges. For one, it echoes IBM's AIX. For those unfamiliar, you have technically two ways of installing software on AIX: Filesets and RPMs. These systems don't really talk to each other, which means there's a potential for destructive changes to the OS by a poorly written fileset overwriting an RPM or vice-versa. I have not proven this to be the case, but there's no interaction between the two, since the RPM port is just a straight port of the Linux version. There's ways that RPM on IRIX can potentially be implemented to get around this, but hear me out. 

The major issues aren't with the tardist format, but the limitations of the IRIX inst/swmgr program at managing dependencies, limitations with handling formats, and more. 

If we have someone recreate inst, this would solve a few issues:

1. It'd retain a centralized way of managing packages, and allow features to be added like HTTPS, FTP etc. retrieval, package signing and verification, smarter conflict resolution, and even frontends or hooks to allow RPM to work non-destructively, or any other package system.

2. We would be able to roll something similar to an SRPM (source rpm) or a raw tarball that could still be implemented into it. Again, this could all be extended in a FOSS version.

3. inst seems to have trouble with both gnu and bsdtar if you use them to replace IRIX tar. There is, however, nothing stopping a bsdtar or gnutar from the base system other than the inst problem. Replacing inst/swmgr would give us the ability to permanently replace IRIX tar with a foss equivalent. 

To that end, I'm willing to put down some money to pay someone to do this, assuming they do it under a permissive license (BSD, Apache2, MIT, ISC, zlib) and keep the source code well documented. If others feel the same way, let's get a bounty started somehow. If others have better suggestions, I'm all ears.