Even if Alpine is designed to run from RAM, it has some similarities in package management with both Gentoo and Debian. This page outlines those similarities and differences, to help Debian and Gentoo users to use Alpine.

The page was originally copied from: http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Converting_from_or_to_Debian

If you wish to use the Alpine Configuration Framework (ACF) front-end for squid, install the acf-squid package: apk add acf-squid You can then logon to the device over (replace x.x.x.x with the IP of your server of course) and manage the squid configuration files and stop/start/restart the daemon etc.

• 1Package management
• 2Runlevel & Initscripts
• 3Config Files

Where Gentoo has portage and emerge; Debian has, among others, apt; Alpine uses apk-tools. This section compares how apk-tools is used, in comparison to apt-get/aptitude and emerge.

Note that Gentoo is source-based, just like ports in FreeBSD are, while Debian uses pre-compiled binaries. Alpine is compiled using Gentoo's portage, but Alpine itself uses its own apk-tools binary package which is more similar to FreeBSD's binary packages.

1. Alpine is compiled using Gentoo's portage, but Alpine itself uses its own apk-tools binary package which is more similar to FreeBSD's binary packages. Updating package database Gentoo will update the build-from-source scripts and are the updating of the database is takes much more time that updating the database for Debian or Alpine.
2. How to install telnet into a alpine docker container. This is useful when using the celery remote debugger in a dev environment. Clone via HTTPS Clone with Git.

Updating package database

Gentoo will update the build-from-source scripts and are the updating of the database is takes much more time that updating the database for Debian or Alpine.

Alpine

Gentoo

Debian

Showing available updates

Show which packages have an update available:

Alpine

or:

Gentoo

Debian

Updating a particular package

Alpine

Debian

Gentoo

Installing packages

Alpine

For source compile, see the Aports tree and the abuild tool.

Gentoo

Debian

Debian source compile:

(optional: customize the build by modifying the debian/rules makefile)(or set environmental variables like DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS)(note that this will make your bug reports invalid to the maintainer)

Simplified source compile:

(the packages are automatically generated using the -b switch above)

Note: This process can be used to backport packages from testing and unstable by simply adding their respective source repositories to sources.list, which is similar to adding ~x86 to package.keywords in Gentoo. This is explored further in the 'Architectures and repositories' section below.

Reinstalling a particular package

Alpine

or:

Gentoo

Debian

Note: You rarely need to reinstall a package on Debian

Searching the package database

Alpine

Alpine Install Git Package

Alpine will only search package names.

Gentoo

To search the package names and descriptions:

Note: On Gentoo, it's actually much better to install and use either the esearch package or the eix package to do a search. You use them like this:

or

Debian

Both emerge and apt-cache search support regular expressions.

To get the long package information on Debian (searching only in package names):

Removing packages

Alpine

apk del will remove configuration files when the --purge flag is used. Make sure you have backups of your configuration files. (Using rcs might be an idea)

You will mostly like to take a quick look at the dependencies before you remove packages recursively.

Alpine Container Install Git

To see dependencies for a package, use:

To see if package is required by other packages (is a dependency for another packages), use:

Gentoo

Debian

or to remove along with all configuration files

Only downloading packages

This can be useful e.g. if you're on a dial-up connection and want to download everything first and install later.

Alpine

Gentoo

Debian

Cleaning up downloaded packages

Compressed packages that were downloaded for installation can easily consume gigabytes of storage space.

Alpine

Alpine will clean up packages automatically.

Gentoo

To only remove outdated packages you will need to install the gentoolkit package and use eclean:

Cleaning temporary files from emerging packages:

Debian

Only remove outdated packages:

Reverse dependencies

Alpine

apk-tools will take care of reverse dependencies.

Gentoo

Reverse dependencies are a major drawback of Gentoo's current portage implementation: It does not take care of them at all at the moment.If you use the unsafe --unmerge argument, this means that you can uninstall packages needed by others without being warned about it. E.g. you can remove the X server package without portage warning you that KDE (which you have installed as well) depends on it. This way you can actually break your entire system (e.g. by removing glibc).

can fix broken dependencies broken byemerge --depclean

Recent versions of portage include library tracking and preservation with the preserved-libs feature. Portage will notify you to run

emerge @preserved-rebuild

to help rebuild binaries that might otherwise become broken.

Debian

Reverse dependencies are taken care of by dpkg.

Runlevels work pretty conventionally on Debian (see details: systemd). On Alpine and Gentoo, they are a bit different.

Directories and files

In Debian, runlevels are named conventionally (0-6 and S). They are represented by directories in /etc/ called rc*.d (when the default sysv-rc boot loader package is installed; file-rc can be installed instead, and then the relevant file is runlevel.conf).

• /etc/rc0.d
• /etc/rc1.d
• /etc/rcS.d
• /etc/rc2.d
• /etc/rc3.d
• /etc/rc4.d
• /etc/rc5.d
• /etc/rc6.d

In Gentoo, runlevels have the same names, but these are mapped to more self explanatory ones (in /etc/inittab): 'boot', 'default', 'nonetwork', with the option to add more. The directories that represent them are in /etc/runlevels/:

• /etc/runlevels/boot
• /etc/runlevels/default
• /etc/runlevels/nonetwork

In Gentoo, if a service is not explicitly started in a runlevel, it is stopped when switching to that runlevel! There is no explicit stopping of runlevels as in Debian (/etc/rc?.d/K??service).

In both Debian and Gentoo, which things are started (and stopped) in which runlevels is controlled by links in the runlevel directories to scripts in /etc/init.d/, e.g.:Gentoo

Debian

AlpineIn Alpine, runlevels work like they do in Gentoo:

• /etc/runlevels/boot
• /etc/runlevels/default
• /etc/runlevels/sysinit
• /etc/runlevels/nonetwork
• /etc/runlevels/shutdown

Runlevel management

To manage which things to start in which runlevels, use the following commands:

Alpine

To see current status of services in runlevels, do:

To add sshd to default runlevel, do:

The -k option will make sure sshd is stopped when shutting down or reboot.To remove sshd from all runlevels do:

Gentoo

To add the cupsd to the default runlevel, do:

To remove alsasound from the boot runlevel, do:

Also see this wiki page about gentoo runlevel management with rc-update

Debian

Configure cupsd to be started in runlevels 2, 3, 4, 5, and stopped in 0, 1, 6, with sequence code 20:

or simply:

Remove cupsd from all runlevels:

/etc/portage/make.conf and use flags

While in Gentoo there's a large number of configuration files which control the behaviour of the package management system, there are comparatively fewer in Debian, as there is no need to dictate how to compile software which is downloaded and tweak/alter it. In Gentoo, the file /etc/portage/make.conf is used for much configuration; this includes USE flags, which influence which elements of packages are compiled, and which libraries to build support for - common USE flags (USE or -USE to specifically negate support) include 'gtk gnome' for Gnome users (and a corresponding -qt -kde -arts) and 'qt kde arts' for KDE users. A Gentoo user's complete set of use flags may look something like this:

USE='-kde -arts -qt xv truetype bluetooth crypt slang readline gpm berkdb mmx gdbm tcpd pam libwww ssl nls ethereal perl python esd gif imlib sdl oggvorbis mpeg gnome gtk X motif opengl avi png tiff nptl pcmcia nptl ldap eds'

Architectures and repositories

Gentoo

Also in /etc/portage/make.conf is the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS setting, with (for an X86-based processor) two settings, x86 for stabler packages, and ~x86 for bleeding edge packages. It is however not recommended to make this change in /etc/portage/make.conf. Rather configure this per-package in /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords. It's enough to put a line into that file naming the package (for example 'app-foo/bar'). That file might look like this:

The last line says, that only version 4.3-r1 should be unmasked. Older and newer versions will still be ignored.

Note for non-x86 users:The keywords x86 and ~x86 can of course be replaced by sparc and ~sparc for example.

Debian

Setting this in Debian is slightly more complicated, and is accomplished by setting different 'repositories' in /etc/apt/sources.list - along with which 'tree' to use for packages; in Debian, these are stable, testing, and unstable. An /etc/apt/sources.list file for a debian testing user may look something like this:

Alternatively, /etc/apt/sources.list can contain any number of repositories for any trees, and a default tree (this can be overridden using the -t switch on the command line) in /etc/apt/apt.conf:

Per-package settings go in /etc/apt/preferences, somewhat like Gentoo's /etc/portage/package.keywords.

Network

Alpine

Alpine uses /etc/network/interfaces, just like Debian. The main reason is because this is the way busybox does it.

/etc/network/interfaces:

Gentoo

/etc/conf.d/net:

Note that this has changed recently. For more information please refer to http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=4

Debian

/etc/network/interfaces:

This chart shows how some standard things are done in Alpine compared to other distributions.

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