Hi Folks, It appears that pkg-get that I had been working on for several days is not under a FOSS license. As such it cannot be freely modified and used. As per original plan a pkg-get based enhanced framework was to be the centerpiece of the repository support for BeleniX at present using SVR4 packages. This pours cold water over that plan and screws up the 0.7.2 schedule.
Now we are forced to consider alternatives. Of course changing the packaging framework is a major change that cannot be done at a short notice and definitely not for 0.7.2 incremental release. However a repository setup for BeleniX is absolutely needed sooner rather than later. This situation now leaves us with 2 possibilities: 1) Rewrite a pkg-get like utility from scratch. 2) Re-use existing packging-agnostic repository frameworks. #1 is a whole bunch of effort though not massive but still re-invention of an existing wheel by necessity. #2 needs some investigation as to whether such a framework actually exists. Surprisingly after doing quite a bit of net-surfing I was unable to locate any such framework! The closest I have come to identifying possible candidates are the Smart Meta Package Manager (http://labix.org/smart) and the Createrepo (http://linux.duke.edu/projects/metadata/) utility. Smart is designed to be layered over existing base native packaging utility and easily extensible that kind of suits our purpose. It provides advanced dependency algorithms and advanced Yum/Apt kind of features.However Smart does not provide a repository framework. This is where Createrepo comes into the picture by providing a utility to generate and manage repository metadata that is recognized by Smart. Createrepo is written in Python and can only handle RPM packages. It is seems to be not written in an extensible way and the code has virtually zero comments!! So it will be tricky to make it work with SVR4. Smart + Createrepo appears to be an attractive option even for the longer term since Smart can add value of Dpkg as well. This will be useful if we decide to go with Nexenta's port of Dpkg to OpenSolaris eventually. I'd like to get opinions/feedback on this. However please note that I am *not* looking at changing from SVR4 packaging at this point. The solution *must* work with SVR4. Regards, Moinak. -- ================================ http://www.belenix.org/ http://moinakg.wordpress.com/
