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Effing Package Management

by dominis on 12/8/11, 5:16 PM with 13 comments

• by ajross on 12/8/11, 6:58 PM

  Yet another attempt to abstract things that cannot be abstracted. Works as long as your "package" is a blob of files. Doesn't seem to understand anything else. Some package management systems allow dependencies (on other packages, on files, or on abstracted "capabilities") that are inherently system-dependent.

  All this provides vs. using plain tarballs (or even "make install") is the ability to back out and upgrade your custom packages using your system's package management command.

• by joeyh on 12/8/11, 8:44 PM

  I suppose it's nice that http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/alien/ finally has some competition. ;)

  I'm unsure of the wisdom of conflating package format conversion (rpm, deb, puppet) with package building (from gem or python sources).

• by serverascode on 12/8/11, 6:58 PM

  I think this is effing awesome, and will be trying it out soon.

  Don't understand why devs use apt-get/yum to run their linux desktop but often code their app in such a way that it can't be managed with OS level packaging. Don't imagine a lot of developers manage their own personal linux distro. Probably some... :)

• by draegtun on 12/9/11, 1:09 PM

  Also see Acmeist Package which allows you to create packages in CPAN, PyPI and Ruby Gems.

  ref: https://metacpan.org/module/Package & http://acmeism.org/projects/

• by serverascode on 12/9/11, 4:36 PM

  Just used this today to create rpms from the rubygems-mirror and it's dependencies so that I could install on a redhat server and mirror rubygems.org for local builds.

  Worked great.

• by binarycrusader on 12/8/11, 8:52 PM

  The 'solaris' option is a bit bogus though; it should be named 'SVR4'. As of Solaris 11, SVR4 packages are no longer the expected package format.