[lug] February 14th talk?

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> ">" == D Stimits <stimits at idcomm.com> writes:

>> More food for thought on packaging: If I were to spend some of my
>> idle unemployment time making a package tool, it would be a moduler
>> OO design, with "plugins" for various file formats to output. I
>> would be interested in knowing if the various package speakers see
>> a common theme of describing input packages, the purpose being
>> something like an abstract package description language that could
>> be used in an OO program to produce *any* output format.

I've looked at doing this before.  I stopped since there didn't seem
to be an obvious user base.  Every vendor has already solved the
packaging problem to their own satisfaction.

In any case, my conclusion was that most of the packaging systems (and
certainly the Big 2 Linux systems -- I was also looking at Solaris,
HP, Irix) use pretty much the same info; they just represent it
differently.  The real problem with a generic packager is not in the
formatting, though, but in deciding what parts of a source package
should go into which binary package.  Every distribution seems to have
its own policies regarding package naming, splitting packages, etc.


In any case, someone else has started work along these lines.  They
have patches to automake which give it package targets:

    http://www.gyve.org/~jet/autopack/

I haven't (yet) looked at this.  This web page (if you can read it --
I find their color selection terrible) has links to a couple other
similar projects.  This one might be interesting to you:

    http://psychomix.dhs.org/projects/buildpkg/

Tom