Hello, Background: I work for the Symbian Foundation. We're a non-profit that over-see the Symbian operating system. This is an open source (EPL) OS for mobile phones, primarily used by Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung, or anyone else that wants to. My team is "technology management", we work on the platform road map, sourcing contributions, etc.
I've been asked to find a better way to distribute our SDKs and tools to the developer community. Right now, we have a bunch of *huge* zip files on a web server that developers are expected to download, unzip and used. It couldn't be much less sophisticated. This is quite a big problem, as the operating system is ~32 million LOC and development is very active. In practice, most of these big companies have their own in-house solutions, but we really want something that works for everybody. To me, the obvious solution seems to be package management, as I'm very much against reinventing the wheel and can see projects like yum have already solved some common problems brilliantly. I have a few concerns though, so I'd really appreciate if anyone can answer any of the following (with respect to yum?) or generally offer advice if you think we're barking up the wrong tree! * Given that this is an SDK we're distributing, I think the package manager's database should work with a "sub-environment" on the developer's machine, i.e. not touch anything that belongs to the host OS and work from a configurable root environment variable. Is that already supported in yum? Or, does it sound like a bad idea generally speaking? * We have a commitment to support all major platforms. Would we be able to port yum to Windows/Mac trivially, or should we forget it? I sense headaches in creating RPMs that even make sense on a Windows environment, but the limited scope of installing packages to the SDK environment only might help overcome that? Also, any recommendations for documentation I should look at would be great. Thanks very much for your time! James. -- James Aley, Technology Specialist Symbian Foundation. www.symbian.org _______________________________________________ Yum-devel mailing list Yum-devel@lists.baseurl.org http://lists.baseurl.org/mailman/listinfo/yum-devel
