Final status: Linux packages for pkg(8)

[Manuel Wiesinger]

Hi,

Fully integrating my code into pkg(8), was unfortunately not entirely
possible, within the scope of this years summer of code. The
architecture to install packages is very specific and tailored for
binary packages (i.e. common FreeBSD-packages).

Changing huge parts of an existing software architecture requires lots
of discussion. That was not possible in time. I think it would have made
little sense to spend much time to get it working in a hackish way, that
is ugly and thus useless in the end. For this reason I mocked many
functions in accordance with bapt@ and created a very detailed list of
suggested changes, to abstract functions so that they are repo specific.
This list was was mailed to bapt@ for evaluation.

Of course, it is important to me to fully integrate my code into pkg(8)
and make it a part of FreeBSD. I will work through my list of
suggestions stepwise and open pull requests on Github. This way
discussion will take place regardless of the availability of upstream
developers.
I hope in the end this will highly simplify the development for other
package types, such as RPMs (and conditionally even ruby-gems, etc.)

There is fully working and fully integrated code for updating
repositories, verifying the the manifests using gpg and for
creating/deleting databases. There is mocked code for comparing package
versions according to Debian's specification and to analyse, register
and extract Debian-packages. This includes dependency and conflict
parsing. This is basically all that is needed to use an official Debian
repository.

I spent a lot of time of to learn the ropes, and I want to use my gained
knowledge to continue contributing to pkg(8). If possible I'll attend
the EuroBSDcon in Stockholm and present what I have so far.

Thank you for everything,
Manuel