Hello Folks, I have been heads down slogging continuously to get spkg in shape since this is an urgent blocking factor for BeleniX. I now have a full working framework. There are still some ways to go through my TODO list:
* Package cluster support * More advanced searching. Re-implement search using Nucular * Catalog signing * Automate Self - upgrade * Split up config file so that user configuration is not clobbered * Introduce spkg config interface * Use Axel instead of wget to do chunked load-balanced downloads across mirrors * Use spkg for BeleniX Constructor But spkg is in good shape now and can perform ZFS based system upgrades using the BE library from SNAP upgrade. Catalog scanning is also very fast taking hardly a couple of seconds to compare versions for 700+ packages and do a topological sort. The big difference with pkg-get is that spkg pre-computes the entire dependency tree and install/upgrade actions to create a plan. Anyway I have been thinking hard about package repository organization and making things user-friendly. One observation I had was that highly-granular hundreds of packages are needed for high level of customizability but is not user-friendly. None of the Linux distros today provide an easily navigable package repository. For example lets assume that some newcomer to PHP wants to learn PHP development. What packages should he install from the hundreds ? I have been thinking that having a generic package clustering capability will help enormously. The clusters will appear as hierarchical groupings in the repository based around functional or use-case scenarios. This is different from the high-level categorical groupings that are already present. It should be easy to introduce such groupings based on user and developer experiences. I believe this will go a long way to make it easy for users to locate the software they need without worrying about exact package names. This is on my todo list with spkg and does not appear to be tricky. Regards, Moinak. -- ================================ http://www.belenix.org/ http://moinakg.wordpress.com/
