package system for the OLPC

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Sat, 2006-12-30 at 19:28 -0800, Ian C. wrote:
> hello
> I have some software you may be interested in; it is a package
> management system coded in python. 
> The project is called cap-python, it is a pretty basic system. 
> It is coded in a modular fashion so it can be tied into many different
> interfaces and/or 
> an installer for the OS. Currently there is a beta version of a pygtk
> interface for cap-python, 
> a screen shot of it is available at
> http://arcanelinux.org/screenshots/cap-pygtk.jpg . 
> It has object oriented/modular repo database access code, so it can
> access a variety of database formats both 
> local and remote while leaving the possibility for more. It currently
> by default ties into the online 
> capsule repository web service. The online tools for cap-python can be
> seen at http://caps.arcanelinux.org/ . Also the latest documentation
> that was written for it can be found at
> http://inc-omplete.org/wiki/index.php/Capsules/Documentation .
> Thank you for your time, and please let us know if you are interested.

While your packaging system is interesting in some respects our
requirements are quite different from the traditional model pioneered by
RPM and DEB's.  It is perhaps the wrong level that we should be talking
about.  We are going in a direction of more self-contained applications
which can simply be copied to a directory to get them to work.  The base
system itself, while being created via RPM's is installed and updated in
other ways.  The ondisk package database is there for developers and for
people who really want to use packages in the fedora universe but for
the most part will lay dormant.  Dependencies will be simple
dependencies on the base system build number itself and perhaps some
sort of interdependency system for the activity bundles if needed.
However I would like to avoid that if possible since the more
complicated we get the more things can go wrong.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>