I had a dread

[Rick Pettit]

On Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 07:09:22PM +0200, Mikael Karlsson wrote:
> Mon 05 September 2005 09:24 Joe Armstrong (AL/EAB) wrote:
> 
> > What I was suggesting is a wrapper for (say) apt-get - so that once you
> > have made your emerge package XX you
> > evauate the magic function wrapit(apt, debian , "XX") and it automatically
> > produces a debian apt package.
> >
> 
> Hi Joe,
> 
> a couple of projects that might fit into your vision:
> http://componentizedlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page
> http://www.openpkg.org/

I really think it is worth checking out NetBSD Pkgsrc:
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/software/packages.html

I have posted an overview of our build setup before, but perhaps it is worth
repeating.

Our OTP applications (and all other software) is built from source code using
the autotools (i.e. autoconf, automake, libtool, etc). You are going to be hard
pressed to find something as flexible, though there is a learning curve (which
isn't hard to overcome for people willing to RTFM and look at existing 
examples--the OpenSource community is loaded with them).

After building a "distfile" (i.e. foo.tar.gz which can be extracted and
built with the standard "./configure && make && make install") with the
autotools we then package the distfile using NetBSD pkgsrc.

We use NetBSD pkgsrc because it has a lot of features we care about, and
because it is itself ported to most any *NIX we care about. This last point is
a big one--when we switch operating system our NetBSD pkgsrc tree comes with
us; we aren't forced to make new packages (e.g. going from Solaris to *BSD or
Linux and back, etc).

Pkgsrc gives us dependency tracking and even supports additional like package
"views" (which can be handy when you want to install multiple versions of the
same package on a system and not lose track of dependencies).

By building our software with the autotools and packaging it with NetBSD pkgsrc
we save ourselves a lot of headaches if/when we change OS. And though it is not
necessary to remove the native packaging system and replace with pkgsrc we
often do as pkgsrc gives us all we need.

Anyhow, figured it was worth pointing out.

-Rick