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OtherSystems
OtherSystems
In an attempt to benefit from the knowledge and experience accumalated by other package management and catalog systems, i've looked at some of the following. additional comments welcome.
Yellow Dog Updater
An interesting update client for the yellow dog linux distribution utilizes rdf for information set. Might be interesting as a basis for a client implementation.
Debian's apt
The classic standard for good linux package management. I've taken debian's definition of depedencies for gideon as described in the deb control file man page.
Free BSD Port's
I don't have much experience with freebsd port's system. I've used and it works, probably the best thing you can say about a software system. The ports/package system basically lays out a virtual filesystem of packages and distribution files. the packages are binary executables which can retrieve the distribution file and configure it to the spec laid out in the package file.
Gentoo Linux's Portage
A relatively new linux distribution with package management based loosely on a bsd style ports systems with some additional features. Their package management system Portage is written in python.
The package organization of gentoo and of ports system in general lends itself to easy replication via rsync of the ports directory. I feel that this type of system is probably the easiest to mirror. Portage expands upon the ports system to provide better dependency resolution and global options, ie if you enable ldap in the global conf when you install postfix it installs with ldap lookups.
CPAN
The competition:). I can't find much info on the actual implementation of CPAN. if anyone knows of any please add it here or send it to [email protected]
I found one place where some cpan discussion takes place here . and found a set of scripts related to the operation of a server here
There are a few minor problems with CPAN, first the organization scheme seems to require only one author for a package.
i found a little bit info on CPANArchitecture? from google.
PPM Server
Apparently a copy of activestate's ppm server developed by an ex-activator. not sure what its legal status is. the implementation looks fairly clean.
in a nutshell, this is entirely xml based on the osd format. the client and the server appear to store the xml documents descriptions in an aggregated document. The server has interfaces exposed via SOAP.
Py PPM
Active State's python repository. based primarily off PPMServer?. Some legitimate questions emerge as to why duplicate the efforts of Active State in creating a python repository. Active State provides many services and resources to the scripting community. My reasoning, In a nutshell, it does not behoove the community to be beholden to the closed source services of a commercial entity with a vested interest in its own python distribution. for information on pyppm architecture check out Trent Mick's paper on Active State
OSD
The metadata format which forms the basis of Active State's distribution. The format was pioneered by Miramba and Microsoft circa 1997. I know of no other actual implementations other than Active State's package servers.
There are a number things that can be learned from OSD.
XSA
A kissing cousing metadata format of OSD pioneered by xml pythonista Lars Marius Garshol. XSA offers alot more contextual information about a package such as changelogs and author info.
Source Forge
Sadly no updates have been made to the source of this pillar of opensource software development in quite a while, and the cvs is not open, nor will it be now that VA Linux is focusing on closed source development of SF.
There are alot of interesting things that can be found in the relational schema. The concept of a software trove classification does offer signifigantly more metadata for searching and organization, although i found the search capabilities of sourceforge to be suboptimal. The concept of a software trove seems to also have been taken up by freshmeat.net
Fresh Meat
One of the biggest clearing houses of software for an open source developers. Many ideas can probably be gleaned.
Open ACS
This community system has its own package management system with dependencies and file management.
Ciphon
A python client implementation by Suchandra Thapa
Swallow
a catalog server, built with python cgi's and postgres, by Sean Reifschneider.
Net Distro
Amos Latteier's catalog server based on an early version of Zope's CMF. currently unavailable..