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Proposal title
Mentor: DominiqueDumont
Summary: Package thingy for ISV that cooperate with Dpkg/Rpm for a user install
Required skills:
- Perl programming
- Debian packaging
- Notion of Rpm packaging a plus
Description: For ISV (Independent software vendors), delivering packages for Linux distros is a costly nightmare: every distro have different package format, different policies, different names for dependencies. From a distro point of view, ISV packages are considered evil because of security and policy issues. And they cannot be blamed because ISV cannot know all the details of all distributions, the cost would be prohibitive. The goal of this summer of code would be to provide a proof of concept for a ISV package format. The main characteristics of this system are:
- ISV package manager cooperates with native package system. It does NOT replace Dpkg or Rpm
- ISV package file description specifies the file name and purpose, NOT their location (this is for ISV package management to decide). E.g. private library, public library, private data file ... location is decided by ISV package manager.
- ISV package manager produces a native package from ISV package
- Dependency are not declared with native package names, but with functionality names (a bit like the generic names used by update-alternatives). These functionality names are translated into native package name by ISV package manager. These functionality names should be registered centrally may be by LSB, but this is outside the scope of this proof of concept
- ISV package can be installed by user. Hence package scriptlets are forbidden or restricted to pre-defined actions. This idea is close to the DSL language idea pushed by Mancoosi project and Jeff Johnson
Applications: