Former high-ranking Red Hat executives are behind a commercial package management tool said to facilitate system modifications better than dpkg or rpm. The 2003 startup Specifix says its “Conary” tool enables even heavily modified development systems to track upstream versions easily. The company was co-founded by a former Red Hat chief developer and a former VP of engineering services. More here.
Ex Red Hat heavies launch fancy package manager
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Eugenia Loli
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These are some really awesome guys (Didn’t one of these guys actually write RPM?) from Redhat and Fedora! They’ve started a new company and a better packager with cvs-like repository revisioning from the looks of it. Awesome!
” (Didn’t one of these guys actually write RPM?)”
no. these people were fairly high level managerial category people. they have benefited hugely from the recent cash in at redhat and using that to form a new startup. the goal is not simply a package manager but to provide new means of support and flexibility for customers who want to modify stuff heavily
Certainly interesting times for package and distribution management. Maybe with this and autopackage we might finally see a unified base system that doesnt require RPM x, tgz Y or deb Z to function correctly.
Does anyone know of other major software packages using autopackage yet, other than those on the homepage?
Shame Specifix’s website doesnt render properly here in Opera 7..
Does anyone know of other major software packages using autopackage yet, other than those on the homepage? ”
the only major package is inkspace, a sodipodi fork which is pretty good for svg and other image manipulations
>> inkspace
Inkscape, not inkspace
And great to see this happening, the “Linux” Desktop really needs it.
“Inkscape, not inkspace
”
oops. you are right.
”
And great to see this happening, the “Linux” Desktop really needs it. ”
before anyone questions this. the current apt/yum system of meta dependancies doesnt scale very well. we need cross distro packages that the software developers themselves distribute.
Does anyone have a clue?
While things have gotten better for installing apps on Linux I’ve never really thought they were ideal. Sure synaptic is easy and cool but it still doesn’t solve everthing. Hopefully with the help of these guys or another group we’ll finally see the installation process improved to the point where it is windows easy.
Ya know, someone might be able to make a living off creating a huge package repository on the web, and then charging people a monthly fee to access it.
For example, you browse a list of package, click on Firefox, you get a list of different packages for different versions and distros.
“Hopefully with the help of these guys or another group we’ll finally see the installation process improved to the point where it is windows easy”
windows packaging is no where near ideal. msi does better but it needs improvement. windows packaging is more user friendly as of now because windows isnt as modular as linux.
make install, should be enough.
The system package manager, just has to keep trak of updates, and how to remove the package.
What’s needed is more power to the build tool to create an install script (automake, autoconf…) and a way for the system to provide the information needed.
A seperate tool, autoinstall mabey?
Define a standard “system integration hints” format, and we should be all set.
>> make install, should be enough.
Not if you’re running a slow system.
Not even if you’re running a fast system.
And this is highly error prone.
Firstly, a few misconceptions – yes, Eric Troan *did* write the first versions of RPM, he isn’t just “management” you know. He’s also an extremely smart programmer.
Secondly, no, autopackage is totally different to this product. I don’t know much about it, but basically autopackage is similar to InstallShield/NSIS on steroids, whereas this appears to be more a corporate deployment management tool. They have different focuses.
Oh, and the reason there aren’t many projects using autopackage currently is because we ask them not to – Inkscape is helping us beta test, but it’s not currently stable so we maintainer the packages for them. Once we release 1.0 hopefully we’ll start seeing more projects use it.
When do you expect 1.0 to be released?
The status reports are pretty good. keep them coming
“When do you expect 1.0 to be released?”
We estimate somewhere end this year if we’re lucky.
“Ya know, someone might be able to make a living off creating a huge package repository on the web, and then charging people a monthly fee to access it.”
I think Linspire is already doing something close to that idea. Its called: “Click and Run.” Xandros also has something like that.
The largest software repository right now is provided via Mandrake’s club. Debian’s stable is also very large, unfortunately way out of date. I can’t wait for a new version of Debian stable.
I installed the autopackage of inkscape and it worked beautifully. This is the way software should be installed. Autopackage team deserves a lot of credit. They are going to change the way we think about installing software.
Yup. Its going to be intresting when 1.0 is released. The mailing list estimate pinned it down to be sometime at the end of this year!
To be honest I don’t know what the meaning of this ‘conary’ tool is. What is the biggest difference from let’s say apt?
I’m really excited about autopackage, but my main concern is: will linux distributions support is (out of the box), or isn’t that necessary for the succes of it? Everytime autopackage is mentioned on osnews almost every comment is positive. That’s great but I’d like to know the opinion of let’s say the Mandrake developers.
It is not necessary that Linux distros support it out of the box. A .package file will automatically download the autopackage support code if it hasn’t been installed yet. We just need lots of application developers to support it.
Or as Mike said it himself: “autopackage is designed to work even if everybody hates us.”
Thnx for the answer, very clear!
no. these people were fairly high level managerial category people. they have benefited hugely from the recent cash in at redhat and using that to form a new startup. the goal is not simply a package manager but to provide new means of support and flexibility for customers who want to modify stuff heavily
That was actually a rhetorical question. Only someone with very little knowledge of whom these people are would answer “no” to this question, because Mr. Troan did indeed write rpm, among other important Redhat tools, and he’s currently working along with (albeit leading) the Specifix team in writing Conary, a conceptually superior packaging system to rpm.
If you would take time to look at Conary you would see what it really is. Your description is incomplete.
I’ve lost touch with what’s in and not in the Debian Stable pool but I do know there are approaching 14,000 packages in Debian Unstable because I’m on Unstable/Experimental (besides Slackware 10.0). And in Unstable, the packages aren’t outdated, they’re bleeding edge!
But of course if you are on dial-up, doing a dist-upgrade can be quite a challenge.
Unless that is you can get a friend who is on broadband to download and then burn one of the zillions of Knoppixes and Knoppix derivatives which are essentially Debian Unstable distros. 