Portable packaging technology

Question

I am looking for a good portable technology that would allow for unified way to package software that runs on five different platforms. The platforms are Solaris10/SPARC, Solaris10/X86, Solaris11/SPARC, Solaris11/X86, and RHEL6.4/X86. About 95% of the software is portable Java applications but there a small amount of middleware that is platform-specific. Instead of building five different distributable images that are 95% identical (one for every platform), I want to produce a single universal image for all five. If I follow this route, it makes sense to unify the packaging format to have identical look and feel to the installation process and to keep everything neatly arranged in the distributable image. Oh, and different software components in the image are individual packages, much like a distro comprised of a bunch of RPMs.

In a search for a portable packaging mechanism I looked at RPM, which is a pain to build for Solaris (and I need four different builds). I also read up on dpkg and a few other exotic packaging and installation suites. None of them seems to be as portable as I would like it to be. I wish there was a Python version of RPM that does not require anything but Python interpreter, but I could not find anything of this kind.

I would really appreciate any hints as to what existing freeware and portable packaging and installation solutions there are. I can always design and build my own but I would rather rely on somebody else who went this route before me.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I would probably go with NetBSD's pkgsrc. It's mature, supports every OS you'll ever need. And there are lots of example packages that you can use for reference.

Answer 2

Can't do. You want each packaging system for the different platforms to manage your application, and that means a native package for each of them. The alternative solution of packaging the variant part and downloading the fixed part somehow will make a mess of the asumptions that the installable package contains everything required that the packaging solutions include.

This isn't as bad as it looks, just set up your build process to create all alternatives, and ship them all together on e.g. a CD or DVD, or give different download links.

Answer 3

Even while it hasn't been updated for a while, you might investigate Update Center Toolkit which leverages IPS (Solaris 11 native packaging system) to several OSes, including Windows, MacOS, Linux, AIX and older versions of Solaris and provides both a CLI and a GUI.

Download: https://wikis.oracle.com/display/IpsBestPractices/Downloads