From mid-June to early November, I have spent 320 more hours working on package management. After having worked on the bootstrap support in HaikuPorter (which Ingo has already mentioned in his blog entry), I have spent some time reworking the way how Perl and Pythong organize their modules: Scripting languages with module support usually expect to be able to build modules from source and install them somewhere into the hierarchy of the scripting language. In our case, they can no longer just put the built (site-specific) modules into the “standard” folder, as that one is read-only. So the configuration of Perl and Python had to be changed, such that modules built from source are being installed correctly into a writable folder (in the non-packaged hierarchy). Perl already supports the notion of a vendor-modules folder, where packaged Perl modules will be installed (an example of such a beast are the perl modules contained in the git package). That idea has been extended to Python (such that it will automatically pick up the python modules provided by the mercurial package). Separating packaged modules from local (built from source) modules is an idea that should be followed by all (not only scripting) languages ported to Haiku.
The updated perl, python, git, mercurial and scons packages that are the result from that work have not yet been published, but I will do that during the next couple of days.
The end of my first two-man-months contract has been reached, but I’ll be diving right into the next 160 hours of working on package management. So, first of all: a big thank you to all the donors out there!
One month has passed (too fast), so it’s time to summarize the developments
in the fields of package management for Haiku.
The following is a first draft of how package management on Haiku could look like. I’m more than sure that there are aspects missing here, but we need to start the discussion somewhere …
Several people have already added their ideas on package management to the wiki article. Additionally, many opinions have been stated in comments to my first blog entry.
I have tried to incorporate most ideas mentioned into this draft, but due to the sheer amount of contradicting views, some sacrifices have to be made.
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Starting my month of paid Haiku-work today, I was quite astonished to see the many emotional comments that have been added to the announcement. Clearly, the topic seems to be one of heavy likes and dislikes …
Having read all those comments and most of the discussions we had earlier (on the wiki and on the mailing lists), I felt the need to start my blog with the quote given above - as, for me, that pretty much summarizes what there is to say about package management …
