History for OtherSystems

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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":http://yup.sf.net
 
       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":http://www.debian.org

       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":http://www.freebsd.org
       
       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":http://www.gentoo.org

       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":http://www.cpan.org 
    
      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":http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=PPM
 
        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":http://www.activestate.com

        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":http://www.activestate.com
  
   "OSD":http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-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":http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/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":http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/alexandria-dev

       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":http://www.freshmeat.net

      One of the biggest clearing houses of software for an open source
      developers. Many ideas can probably be gleaned.

   "Open ACS":http://www.openacs.org

        This community system has its own package management system 
       with dependencies and file management.
 
   "Ciphon":http://www.sf.net/projects/ciphon

       A python client implementation by Suchandra Thapa 

   "Swallow":ftp://tummy.org/pub

       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..

   Other Systems i haven't looked at

      - "Red Hat Update Network":http://www.redhat.com