Version 5 (modified by soh_cah_toa, 10 years ago)

Changed reference to usage command to help.

Plumage

Plumage is a package manager for the Parrot VM module ecosystem. With it, you can perform tasks such as searching, installing, and testing modules in the ecosystem.

The ecosystem currently includes various compilers targeting Parrot, libraries, language bindings, and more.

Getting Plumage

The Plumage repository is hosted on  Github. You can obtain a copy of the source code by running git clone git://github.com/parrot/plumage.git. To install Plumage, run the following sequence of commands:

parrot setup.pir build      # Builds executable
parrot setup.pir test       # Optional, runs test suite
parrot setur.pir install    # Installs executable

If you received an error message in the last step that's similar to:

Can't mkdir '/usr/local/lib/parrot/[version]/library/Plumage' (Permission denied)

Where [version] is the version of Parrot installed, you need root access to complete the installation. Try prefixing the last command with sudo or su -c.

Plumage is installed to the same directory that Parrot was installed to. This is /usr/local/bin by default. If you want to change this, you need to re-install Parrot. Use the --prefix switch when running Configure.pl. For example, perl Configure.pl --prefix=/foo/bar/baz.

Once the above steps have been completed, you can then begin using Plumage.

NOTE FOR WINDOWS USERS: Since Parrot 3.0.0, Plumage is shipped with the Parrot binaries at  http://sourceforge.net/projects/parrotwin32/.

Usage

To show the list of projects that are in the ecosystem, run plumage projects. After choosing the one you want to install, simply run plumage install <project>. This will build, test, and install the desired project into the Parrot directory tree.

For example, if you want to install partcl (an implementation of Tcl), run:

plumage install partcl

Just like when installing Plumage, root access may be required depending on where the default installation directory is. If that is the case, you will be prompted to enter your password.

If you decide that you no longer need a particular package, you can remove it with the uninstall command. Using partcl as an example again, run:

plumage uninstall partcl

Plumage is able to resolve package dependencies. If package Foo depends on package Bar, installing Foo will also silently install Bar.

For more usage information, run plumage help.