The OpenPKG cross-platform software packaging facility [LWN.net]

Version 1.1 of the OpenPKG cross-platform software packaging facility has been announced.

The announcement states:

OpenPKG is a project founded 2000 by the Development Team from Cable & Wireless Germany's Internet Services division. In January 2002 it was released by Cable & Wireless to the public as Open Source software. Since then OpenPKG is maintained and improved by its original developers and contributors from the Open Source community and is a mature technology in production use.

OpenPKG has been released under an MIT style license.

The aim of the OpenPKG project is to create a software packaging facility that works across a wide variety of Unix flavors. Currently it supports FreeBSD, RedHat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, and Sun Solaris. NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Compaq Tru64 are partially supported.

OpenPKG is based on code from version 4 of RedHat's RPM package manager, organized as a self-contained system so that RPM does not need to be installed in order to use the system. An interesting feature is the way in which OpenPKG handles the modification of system files, changes are recommended, but the administrator has to manually make the changes. This should please security conscious admins, although it sounds like a big slow-down for automated installations across many machines.

Version 1.1 of OpenPKG adds more supported platforms, more packages, more granularity in user and group selection, better security for handling system files, support for package activation via software switche variables, and support for proxy packages, which allow multiple packages to share resources with base packages.

Currently, there are over 200 packages available for OpenPKG, conveniently organized into numerous groups. See the package repository for the list.

OpenPKG appears to be very well documented, here are some pointers:

Systems administrators who deal with multiple versions of Unix should consider using OpenPKG, it looks like the kind of utility that could greatly increase productivity.

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