Hi All, First a little background: BeleniX today uses SVR4 packaging. It has been a topic of some discussion when to move out of this legacy packaging format to a different one and what format to use for the longer term. Without detailing the deliberations we have had that will fill pages of text, I can mention that we are leaning towards using Nexenta's port of Dpkg (Base Debian packaging) along with SMART (not APT). If you have not looked at Smart here is the link: http://labix.org/smart In one word it is Fantastic! It also has some serious backing.
However all that is for the longer run. It is significant effort to move to a new packaging base requiring changes to a bunch of distro toolchains. In the meantime we *need* a package repository solution for SVR4 base packages. So that is what I am hacking on at present. Essentially a Pythonic layer over SVR4 to give APT/Yum like features. I have the core framework, basic install and dependency resolution ready. You can check out the current implementation files here: http://belenix.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/belenix/trunk/spec_files/ext-sources/spkg?revision=150&view=markup http://belenix.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/belenix/trunk/spec_files/ext-sources/spkg_mod.py?revision=150&view=markup http://belenix.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/belenix/trunk/spec_files/ext-sources/tsort.py?revision=150&view=markup http://belenix.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/belenix/trunk/spec_files/ext-sources/spkg.conf?revision=150&view=markup Code review and comments welcome. If you want to play with the package you can download and install: http://belenix.org/binfiles/SFEspkg.tar.gz Running spkg prints out a complete usage text. Note that this initial work in progress and only 'spkg install' and 'spkg updatecatalog' are implemented. Now you might wonder why all this effort when we are going to change to something else going forward. For one it is kind of like we are between a rock and a hard place! We need something now and it is not feasible to change to Dpkg right away. In addition all the Pythonic work that I doing now will not go to waste. SMART is written in Python and some of the code will be used when making SMART work with OpenSolaris nuances. This was posted over at belenix-discuss but I am also posting it here to reach a wider audience. Regards, Moinak. -- ================================ http://www.belenix.org/ http://moinakg.wordpress.com/
