Autopackage

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Autopackage

Installing Inkscape and downloading dependencies
Developer:	Mike Hearn
Latest release:	1.2.2 / March 24, 2007
OS:	Linux
Use:	Package management system
License:	GNU Lesser General Public License
Website:	http://autopackage.org/

Autopackage is a computer package management system for Linux. Autopackage aims to make 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 March 2007. Autopackage has been starting to gain some popularity. High profile projects such as Gaim 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. Released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, Autopackage is free software.

1 Methodology
2 Criticism
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[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 packages are actually executable bash scripts, so that they can be installed simply by running them.

Autopackage is a complementary system to a distribution's usual packaging system, such as RPM and deb. Unlike these formats, Autopackage checks for the presence of dependencies on the actual system, rather than querying a database of package information. 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] Criticism

Since Autopackage packages are actually executable shell scripts, they can present a significant security weakness, much like shar archives, and in contrast to tarballs or ZIP files. Files in an Autopackage archive are also not easily extracted by anything other than Autopackage itself.^[1] Autopackage programs are installed to system paths which may conflict with existing installed packages, thus leading to corruption.^[2]