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Wednesday 04 May 2005 7:49:34 am
Greetings, I would really like to write an Exponential package manager. Silly no? Today I noticed that ez.no/community has brought their rss feeds to the main page (see: Essential Information). How much more would it take to do the same thing for the contributions? I saw xrow's ezsvn extension; used it for a while and got excited. So I'm re-posting my ideas right away. So how can I do this ? A lot of tools already exist to provide a number of the dependencies of a package manager. a package format, a n installer, several repositories of extensions and packages in several categories, ezsvn, ...
What's missing? An ez.no provided resource list of it's ez.no contribution repository. All the information is in the contribs section waiting to be screen scraped or mirrored but that's not much in a community spirit. If the same information was provided in simply another format it could be used by an automated program.
The main problem with my ideas are they would depend on ez systems to approve of the additions to ez.no I believe could be needed for the package manager to use ez.no as a primary mirror for package information. The main thing I need is information. With the most simple amount of information provided in a parseble format. If I could get a feed of any kind, which had the full details of each contribution in the contrib(s) node tree.
Requested Details for the contribution section's projects :
- Name
- Created Date
- Updated/Modified Date
- Category
- Author
- Version
- eZ compatibility (version / range)
- Package (http link to ez.no hosted package)
- Package Type (svn, package or standalone) (svn, builds (zip,tar,tar.gz,bzip2) or standalone).
- Package Size (kbs)
- Stability (alpha, beta, stable)
- Package Download Count
- Screenshot url(s)
- Introduction
- Description
- Changelog
- (optional, array) package dependencies (name/version)
- (optional, array) resource links, project homepage, cvs, svn, faq, docs, development thread, etc.
- (optional, array) comments With the above information the package manager could present an administrator with a list of contributions which were packaged or hosted via svn and available for automated installation (ie: hacks would require manual installation but could be downloaded to a stage directory). The ability to install, update, disable and remove Exponential packages and perhaps their dependencies would be a major improvement for making extensions and packaged solutions dead simple to install directly from any Exponential installation could be really encouraging for both users and solution providers. I am thinking of (apt, diag, yum, emerge) when I think of an advanced Exponential package manager which could start with the most basic requirements and grow to support larger sets of dependencies and other more complicated situations requiring either logic or decisions. It just seems that if I had access to just the most basic information in a easily parsable way It would only be a matter of building the package manager.
what do you think?
//kracker References: http://www.ez.no/bugs/view/6522
Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/
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