About
May 12, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
Note: this software is NOT currently tested against the latest Maestro kernel. See the last section of this blog article.
About
Blimp is a simple package manager for Unix-like operating systems, more specifically for Maestro.
Important
Blimp is currently in early development, and is not yet ready for production use. Expect breaking changes and instability.
Caution
macOS is currently supported for development purposes only. Use with caution as your system integrity is not guaranteed.
This repository contains the following components:
blimp: The package manager itselfblimp-builder: An utility to build packages
The common crate is a library with utilities shared across components.
Build
Build the package manager using:
cargo build # Debug mode
cargo build --release # Release mode
Features:
network(default): Enable network support. Disabling this feature is necessary when the SSL library is not available.
Usage
Man pages are shipped with this repository, and are available in man/.
Blimp
Synchronize packages information with remotes:
blimp update
Install package(s):
blimp install <package>
Upgrade packages:
blimp upgrade
Remove package(s):
blimp remove <package>
Show the whole usage of the command:
blimp
Package builder
The general usage of the command is:
blimp-builder --from <package descriptor> --to <output directory>
The command builds the package according to the descriptor, then installs it in the given output repository (used as a system root).
The --package flag can be used to write the resulting package into an archive instead of installing it. In which case, the output directory is considered as a repository instead of a system root.
Note
The structure of package descriptors and output packages are not yet documented as they are unstable.
Bootstrapping
When building packages for a new system on a different target triplet than the current system, bootstrapping is required.
Documentation about bootstrap toolchain building is available in here.