Polypkg: Another cross-platform packaging tool

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Despite the rise of software packaging, using open source software on unfashionable, legacy systems can leave you with the only option of 'make install'. This is because competing packaging and distribution formats have still not unified, and for developers, supporting lots of packaging scripts is painful. What the world needs is something like autoconf or libtool but for packaging.

This paper introduces PolyPkg, a redistributable, cross-platform package generating shell script with a traditional frontend-model-backend architecture. Its can currently create RPMs, DEBs, Mac OSX, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX native packages. Its input resembles a sectioned RPM spec file, but relies on shell instead of a new macro language. The abstract packaging model includes installing service scripts and expressing inter-package dependencies, and it includes some useful features to allow uniform package testing.

Stream: Development Tools

Paper: PolyPkg

David Leonard holds engineering degrees from The University of Newcastle, and a Computer Science degree from The University of Queensland. The python-ldap project used by Zope is a spin-off from his honours degree project. He was a OpenBSD developer who added pthreads into libc and improved hunt(6); and founded the Brismesh wireless networking project while working at the Distributed System Technology Centre and SAP on adaptive user interfaces. David now works at Quest Software integrating open source Unix projects with Active Directory authentication for large enterprises. In his spare time, he develops the Simple ECMAScript Engine.