[Bug]: Preinstalled packages all marked as manually installed

[Kobaxidze256]

Problem description

Instead of a single meta package combining all preinstalled packages there are a gazillion packages that show up as manually installed.

Steps to reproduce the behavior.

1. Run Termux for the first time
2. run pkg list-installed

What is the expected behavior?

pkg list-installed only showing a "base" meta psckage or something concise and manually installed packages.

System information

• Termux application version: 0.118.1
• Android OS version: 14
• Device model: N/A

[ChiefMikeK]

⁉️ Isn't this a /termux-app/issues build feature request to indicate

• installed-by-default instead of just installed
• vice a /termux-packages/issues bug report.

🤔 So @sylirre maybe this issue transfer was an incorrect asumption or not?

[robertkirkman]

@ChiefMikeK from a certain perspective, it appears that this is a "package request for a base package"

As Arch Linux users might be familiar, there is a package named base in Arch Linux that depends on 28 other packages that are considered, in that distro, required for a minimal system to run.

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/base/-/blob/main/PKGBUILD

I believe if you look into the source code of termux-packages (as opposed to termux-app), you can see that there is a directly analogous code structure present in the file generate-bootstraps.sh that installs 30 packages, many of which are built from the same projects as the equivalent counterpart packages in Arch Linux.

termux-packages/scripts/generate-bootstraps.sh

Lines 448 to 485 in 464e3f8

	pull_package bash # Used by `termux-bootstrap-second-stage.sh`
	pull_package bzip2
	if ! ${BOOTSTRAP_ANDROID10_COMPATIBLE}; then
	pull_package command-not-found
	else
	pull_package proot
	fi
	pull_package coreutils
	pull_package curl
	pull_package dash
	pull_package diffutils
	pull_package findutils
	pull_package gawk
	pull_package grep
	pull_package gzip
	pull_package less
	pull_package procps
	pull_package psmisc
	pull_package sed
	pull_package tar
	pull_package termux-exec
	pull_package termux-keyring
	pull_package termux-tools
	pull_package util-linux
	pull_package xz-utils
	# Additional.
	pull_package ed
	if [ ${TERMUX_PACKAGE_MANAGER} = "apt" ]; then
	pull_package debianutils
	fi
	pull_package dos2unix
	pull_package inetutils
	pull_package lsof
	pull_package nano
	pull_package net-tools
	pull_package patch
	pull_package unzip

I believe it means that this is the appropriate repository to open the issue in, and I think it's kind of an interesting suggestion because it would simplify the readability of the generate-bootstraps.sh significantly, to have all of the base packages in a single metapackage and just adjust it slightly with additional packages inside generate-bootstraps.sh - very comparable to the analogous bootstrap stage of the Arch Linux install guide.

There is another component to this issue besides the mention of a base package though, which is that the pkg list-installed command does not show any of the bootstrap-originated packages with "automatic". One of the ways that could be said to have happened is that termux-packages does not use a "chroot-based" or "debootstrap/debos/mmdebstrap-based" method of handling the bootstrap generation, instead it extracts and tweaks the packages without invoking the dpkg or apt commands at any point during bootstrap generation. It might still be possible to set the package installed status to "automatic" for those packages in a similarly explicit way without having to use apt or dpkg, though.

[sylirre]

@ChiefMikeK Everything is correct, i.e. the packaging issue takes place.

Currently Termux lacks the meta package describing all dependencies for base environment. It exists in some major distributions under different names and I remember we already had 1-2 questions about distinguishing base packages from manually installed.

I think it would be worth to add something like termux-bootstrap. It won't complicate things and is better to offload base packages list from scripts anyway.