Ubuntu Might Get A New Simplified Packaging Format And App Installer

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbN7G5xPrX-G1J8WkEvnVe1UiBvNxrR6gPOOX4v6-r6irjBS6JBeFhz39gQMhyphenhyphenusb3B8EVz4aTMLr86dUimermIa29P6C2od1C6mA_jAAieuDbB5UoviheRKCj72LKeLpU86imPZTOTB_W/s1600/ubuntu-packaging.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbN7G5xPrX-G1J8WkEvnVe1UiBvNxrR6gPOOX4v6-r6irjBS6JBeFhz39gQMhyphenhyphenusb3B8EVz4aTMLr86dUimermIa29P6C2od1C6mA_jAAieuDbB5UoviheRKCj72LKeLpU86imPZTOTB_W/s400/ubuntu-packaging.png" title="Ubuntu packaging" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">According to a recent message posted on the Ubuntu Devel mailing list by Colin Watson, Installer Team leader, <b>Ubuntu might get a new, simplified packaging format and app installer </b>which should make it easier for developers to get their software into Ubuntu. This <b>will target, at least initially, the Ubuntu phone/tablet but it should be usable elsewhere too, even on non-Ubuntu or non-Linux systems</b>. </div><br /><a name='more'></a><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The already existing packages won't change and Ubuntu will continue to use dpkg and apt, syncing with Debian and so on. </b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"<b>Click packages</b>" (the new packaging format) is aimed at making it easier to build packages for Ubuntu: no dependencies between applications, no maintainer scripts and each app will be installed in its own directory.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The new package format needs a new installer and there's already a <b>proof of concept low-level app package installer</b> that's entirely new code - highlights of what it can do so far:</div><ul><li style="text-align: justify;">no dependencies between apps; single implicit dependency on the base system by way of a Click-Base-System field;</li><li style="text-align: justify;">installs each app to an entirely separate directory;</li><li style="text-align: justify;">entirely declarative: maintainer scripts are forbidden;</li><li style="text-align: justify;">base package manager overhead, i.e. the time required to install a trivial package containing a single small file, is about 0.15 seconds on a newish x86 laptop and about 0.6 seconds on a Nexus 7 (and that's with the current prototype implementation in Python; a later implementation could be in C and would then be faster still);</li><li style="text-align: justify;">not limited to installing as root, although there may be similar constraints elsewhere to ensure that apps can't edit their own code at run-time</li><li style="text-align: justify;">packages built by feeding the intended output directory tree to a simple Python tool, plus a manifest.json file;</li><li style="text-align: justify;">building packages requires only the Python standard library, with the intent that it should be possible to build these packages quite easily on non-Ubuntu or even non-Linux systems;</li><li style="text-align: justify;">binary packaging format sufficiently similar to existing one that we could add support to higher-level tools with minimal effort;</li><li style="text-align: justify;">strawman design for hooks into system packages, which will be entirely declarative from the app's point of view;</li><li style="text-align: justify;">unit-tested from the start. </li></ul><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">The Ubuntu developers have also looked into similar existing tools such as <a href="http://listaller.tenstral.net/">Listaller</a> or <a href="http://0install.net/">0install</a> but there are some things which they prefer to do differently; e.g.: Listaller is dependency-based and they prefer this to be as independent as possible and 0install would also need some system integration problems to be solved, so instead, they've decided to create a new installer.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The proof of concept installer is currently under 300 lines of code (Python) and obviously, still needs work. The prototype will be ready in time for <a href="http://uds.ubuntu.com/">UDS</a> next week and there's also going to be an UDS session to discuss this.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>For more info, see Colin Watson's message @ <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-May/037074.html">Ubuntu Devel mailing list</a>. </b><br /></div>

Ubuntu Might Get A New Simplified Packaging Format And App Installer

According to a recent message posted on the Ubuntu Devel mailing list by Colin Watson, Installer Team leader, Ubuntu might get a new, simpli...

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