I was walking to work this morning thinking about package management. It's a rather strange thing to be thinking about; must be because I'm rather delinquent in upgrading most of the installed ports on my FreeBSD box. (I'll have to write up my thoughts on this later)
So, among the things I find today in my daily news trawl is libgnurdf, an RDF parsing library in C. It's part of the GNUpdate framework:
GNUpdate is an open source, universal package management system. What does this mean? Well for starters, it will allow RedHat users to install debian packages, Debian users to install RedHat packages, and so on. It does this through the libpackman library, which provides a single API for accessing multiple package formats and package databases.Interesting. I was thinking more about determining when it's time to upgrade Perl (development is 5.7.3 +/- some patches, current is 5.6.1, supported is 5.005_03, and 5.004_04 is deprecated), based on the state of Perl and the requirements for what you want to install. RDF is a natural way to describe this well-known breakdown on software currently in development. The .rpm/.deb issue is a wrinkle I hadn't thought too much about. Glad to see someone else is thinking about it though. :-)
