Autopackage
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Autopackage | |
|---|---|
 Installing Inkscape and downloading dependencies |
|
| Developed by | Mike Hearn |
| Latest release | 1.2.5 / May 27, 2008 |
| OS | Linux |
| Genre | Package management system |
| License | GNU Lesser General Public License |
| Website | autopackage.org |
Autopackage is a computer package management system aimed at making it simple to create a package that can be installed on all Linux distributions and have that package integrate well into the desktop environment.
Autopackage is still under active development as of July 2007. Autopackage has been starting to gain popularity. High profile projects such as aMSN and Inkscape now offer an Autopackage installer, and the popular software website Freshmeat.net offers content submitters a field to put the URL of Autopackages. The list of available packages is very limited, and most program versions are obsolete (for example, the most recent Autopackage of Gimp is 2.2.6, even though Gimp is now at version 2.4.1, as of May 2008).[1] [2]
Released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, Autopackage is free software.
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[edit] Methodology
Autopackage is intended to be used for installing non-core applications such as word processors, web browsers, and personal computer games, rather than core libraries and applications such as operating system shells. For core applications and libraries, the distribution's native package manager is recommended for speed and compatibility reasons. Non-core libraries are something of a thorny issue, on the one hand packaging them allows installation on a greater range of systems, on the other hand there can be issues with conflicts when native packages are installed that depends on libraries that have been installed by autopackage.
Autopackage is a complementary system to a distribution's usual packaging system, such as RPM and deb. Unlike these formats, Autopackage verifies dependencies by checking for the presence of files on the actual system, rather than querying a database of installed packages. Although this reduces compatibility issues with different package naming conventions, it does mean that Autopackage is slower than distributions' native formats.
Autopackage uses APbuild to strip bogus dependencies, "double-compile" to make C++ programs compatible with different versions of g++, and fix GLIBC version symbols, among other things. Programs that use autopackage must also be relocatable, meaning they can be installed into any location without needing to be recompiled. It is thus possible to install an autopackage as a non-root user in the user's home directory.
[edit] Package format
Autopackage packages are actually executable bash scripts, so that they can be installed simply by running them. Since Autopackage packages are actually executable shell scripts, they can present a significant security weakness, much like shar archives, in contrast to tarballs or ZIP files. On the other hand one has to keep in mind that most distribution's packages (eg. Debian's deb-files) also make use of shell scripts to perform the actual installation. In addition, files in an Autopackage archive might not easily be extracted by anything other than Autopackage itself.[3]
Autopackage programs are installed to hard-coded system paths, which may conflict with existing packages installed by other means, thus leading to corruption.[4] This can usually be remedied by uninstalling an older version of a package being installed with Autopackage.
