The OpenPKG project released
version 2.5 of their cross-platform Unix software packaging facility. All software is carefully packaged for easy deployment on 19 different Unix platforms, including FreeBSD 4.11/5.4/6.0/7.0, NetBSD 2.0.2, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Fedora Core 4, SUSE Linux 9.3/10.0, Mandriva Linux 10.2 and Sun Solaris 8/9/10. The major technical efforts for this release were spent on migrating to GCC 4.0, further improving the Solaris 10, FreeBSD 6.0 and SUSE 10.0 support.
Unfortunately the licensing is going to keep it from being accepted by distributions like OpenBSD. Shame. Had it been based on MIT or BSD license throughout, this would have stood a chance to be more widely used.
Since it is partly GPL, there is no compelling reason for the Linux distributions to switch over.
So how is this better than $PKG_MANAGMENT_SYTEM?
How dows it stack up to:
conary
portage
apt
pkgsrc
autotools
autopackage
smartpm
?
it doesn’t .. infact there are some major draw backs, many people in the community have argued that its not even really a true package management system. google for it and you’ll see what I mean.
Damned near everyone is going to continue using their own packaging systems anyway, making this project’s existance pretty much pointless.
That said, I’m still glad that the DragonFly folks have opted to go with NetBSD’s pkgsrc.