On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 07:31:18PM +0530, Moinak Ghosh wrote: > #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.
+1. Smart is extremely good. > 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. Seems to be another tool (mrepo) which seems to do something similar. http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/mrepo/ Not sure if it is any better than createrepo. A quick look at the source did not help. Another possible option (a very ugly one, but I have seen something similar used before) is to wrap the SVR4 package into an RPM. The RPM just contains the SVR4 blob and a pre-install script which extracts the SVR4 blob and does a pkgadd on it. We'd need to extract dependency information from the SVR4 package and add it to the wrapper RPM. Could possible be considered strictly as a short-term workaround. Too ugly a solution to continue with for long. Venky.
