Tiny Core Base > TCB Q&A Forum

How to know which extension version is installed?

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Zlika:
Hi,

I cannot find a way to know which precise version of a given extension is installed. As *.tcz.info files are not downloaded by tce-load, it seems that there is no way to know which version was installed (to have some sort of traceabillity / configuration management). We can only know the version of TinyCore itself, using the "version" command.
Is there a way to know externsion versions?

Regards,
Thomas

volkerp:
Hi Zlika,

tce-ab doesn't solve your problem?

Misalf:
tce-ab or the info files only show which version is available in the repo. If you check the md5 files you can only tell if it's the same version or not, but not which one.
For this very reason I have hacked some tce-* scripts to always download and don't delete the info files.

curaga:
There is no historical archive of versions/md5sums anywhere, so it's not possible to know how many versions were skipped. edit: or to download a certain old extension version.

You can download info files easily with the tce-fetch.sh command, "tce-fetch.sh binutils.tcz.info".

Zlika:
Thank you for your answers.
That's definitively a big issue of the extension system. I hope it will be fixed in a latter release.
Downloading the info file is only a dirty workaround because:
* there is no way to download both the tcz and the info file in a single "transaction" (that means that the info file can change while we are downloading the tcz file)
* the info file is only for information purpose and does not really encode a clear, unique and consistent version number (different versions of the same tcz are often uploaded with the same info file)

Another big flaw of the way extensions are managed in TinyCore is that there is no clear link to the source code that was compiled to produce the tcz binary, so it is not possible to recompile the extensions from sources by ourself, or check that no backdoor was introduced in the extension. For example, I provided the openjdk-8 extensions, and nobody asked me for the source code! It amazed me, because I read an article from the original author of TinyCore saying that extensions were always built from sources and that no binary extension without source code was allowed: that's simply untrue.

I am concerned of the security implications of all these points.

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