History
How PkgForge got here
Toolpacks
@Azathothas used to be a bug bounty hunter. Setting up pentesting environments on remote servers was frustratingly slow, since tools like reconftw would install entire toolchains just to get a few binaries out of them.
Around July 2023 he started maintaining scripts to fetch precompiled binaries instead. What began as wrappers around eget grew into several repositories, and eventually consolidated into Toolpacks. Toolpacks was archived on 2025-01-01 as part of a rewrite.
Two package managers came out of that period before Soar did. @pwnwriter created Hysp in November 2023, the first one to read Toolpacks. @Xplshn went from bdl to BigDL to Dbin.
Soar
After Toolpacks#28, portable package formats came into scope: AppImages, AppBundles, FlatImages and RunImages. These did not fit what Toolpacks was, so pkgcache was created on 2024-09-25 to hold them, alongside bincache for static binaries.
Encouraged by community interest on Lobsters, @Azathothas approached @QaidVoid, and Soar received its first commit on 2024-10-03. The PkgForge organization was created on 2024-11-04, and soarpkgs with it.
soarpkgs today
soarpkgs started as a tree of SBUILD recipes, YAML build scripts that produced the packages published through bincache and pkgcache. That arrangement is gone. The two caches were folded into a single index, and SBUILD was replaced by a declarative format where a package is a pinned URL and a hash rather than a script that runs.
The few packages that genuinely need building moved to pkgforge/builds, which publishes releases soarpkgs pins like any other upstream.
Inspiration
This project builds on the work of andrew-d/static-binaries, minos-org/minos-static, mosajjal/binary-tools, ryanwoodsmall/static-binaries, and others.
Further reading
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