Monday, March 28 2005 @ 03:08 PM EST Contributed by: glosser
Autopackage has hit 1.0 status. This very interesting project allows for easier installation of software for ALL Linux distributions. Desktop integration is part of the equation, along with uninstall capabilities.
Autopackage is stable, tested software that has been deployed by high profile projects. It has a strong commitment to backwards compatibility: your packages will continue to install as we add new features, although you may need to recompile them to get the new functionality.
Version 1.0 can build, install, verify and uninstall fairly complex packages (mplayer, gaim, inkscape etc), and promises backwards compatibility from this point forward.
It can resolve dependencies either from local files or from remote servers. It currently has simple support for package updates. It does not support integration with the native package manager although these features are planned for after the 1.0 release.
We also provide a collection of tools to let you build high quality portable binaries. The most important is apbuild, which is a drop-in build environment which creates binaries that work on older Linux distros by controlling glibc symbol versions, dependency scoping and correcting common distro portability mistakes. It includes relaytool which can be used to convert required dependencies into optional ones by automatically building dlopen/dlsym thunks.
There will be a series of bugfix 1.0.x releases, with development work taking place in CVS. Kernel versioning is used, so the next stable release will be the 1.2 series.
