AlienVFS

AlienVFS is a virtual filesystem that mirrors modules installed by programming language package managers under a centralized directory. In other words, modules installed through CPAN, LuaRocks, PIP and friends are exposed under a single mount point. The virtual directory presents the module name and one or more subdirectories holding the installed version(s) of that module.

Supported package managers

AlienVFS has built-in support for a few package managers:

• LuaRocks (Lua)
• CPAN (Perl)
• PIP and PIP3 (Python)
• RubyGems (Ruby)

The virtual filesystem tree automatically updates whenever a new programming language module is installed or removed by the package managers.

Dependencies

AlienVFS depends on the following packages:

Fedora	Ubuntu	GoboLinux
libattr-devel	libattr1-dev	ATTR
luarocks	luarocks	Lua
lua	lua5.3	LuaRocks
lua-devel	liblua5.3-dev	Fuse
fuse	fuse
fuse-devel	libfuse-dev

Installation

Assuming you want to install from the most recent Git snapshot, the following two lines are enough to install AlienVFS on a regular distro:

$ git clone https://github.com/gobolinux/AlienVFS.git
$ sudo luarocks install AlienVFS/rockspecs/alienvfs-scm-1.rockspec

You may also instruct LuaRocks to install it under your home directory with:

$ luarocks --local install AlienVFS/rockspecs/alienvfs-scm-1.rockspec

Next, make sure that /etc/fuse.conf contains the following line enabling regular users to access the modules exposed by AlienVFS under the given mountpoint:

user_allow_other

Usage

Under a GoboLinux distribution, the main script will be saved under /System/Aliens/LuaRocks/bin. A local installation will place the main file under ~/.luarocks/bin. If that directory is not on your $PATH, make sure to append it to that variable and then invoke AlienVFS, passing as argument the mount point where modules will be shown:

$ mkdir -p /Mount/Aliens
$ AlienVFS /Mount/Aliens

You can now browse the contents of /Mount/Aliens using regular tools.

$ ls /Mount/Aliens
CPAN:Authen::SASL     LuaRocks:luafilesystem  PIP:google-api-python-client  PIP:Pygments
CPAN:Digest::HMAC     LuaRocks:luaposix       PIP:htmlmin                   PIP:pyldap
CPAN:Encode::Locale   PIP:agate               PIP:httplib2                  PIP:PyOpenGL
CPAN:Error            PIP:agate-dbf           PIP:idna                      PIP:pyparsing
...

$ ls /Mount/Aliens/PIP:pyldap
2.4.28

$ ls /Mount/Aliens/PIP:pyldap/2.4.28
dsml.py   dsml.pyo  _ldap.so    ldapurl.pyc  ldif.py   ldif.pyo
dsml.pyc  ldap      ldapurl.py  ldapurl.pyo  ldif.pyc  pyldap-2.4.28-py2.7.egg-info