apkg

apkg is going to be Free and Open Source minimalist cross-distro packaging automation tool aimed at producing high quality packages for many different OS distributions/packaging systems with minimum overhead.

why?

There are many different packaging tools, but none of them provided me with satisfactory packaging automation that allows creating high quality packages for different distros such as Debian, Arch or Fedora directly from upstream repos with ease.

I've already created rdopkg that tackles automated packaging of hundreds of RPM packages across different projects, distros, versions, and releases but it's bound to RPM packaging only and thus it's useless outside of Fedora/CentOS/RHEL.

apkg is going to inherit good features and principles of rdopkg (determined and refined after > 5 years in production) without the accumulated bloat and more importantly without the chains of a specific platform.

I'd much prefer to use an established tool that already exists, but to my knowledge and experience, there is simply no such tool in existence at this time. I hope to describe flaws of various existing packaging tools and systems in the future but... let me show you some code first, yes?

status

development just started, please see apkg design wiki page - comments welcome!

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installation

apkg is going to provide various packages of itself once it's useful, but for now please use the source.

requirements

Python module requirements are listed in requirements.txt.

Once you have pbr (python3-pbr) installed, rest of requirements can be automatically installed by setup.py.

user development install

I use this for python projects I develop actively:

git clone https://gitlab.nic.cz/packaging/apkg
cd apkg
python3 setup.py develop --user

This creates a link in ~/.local/lib/python3.X/site-packages/apkg.egg-link and also installs apkg script into ~/.local/bin so make sure you have ~/.local/bin in your $PATH, possibly before system bin paths to override apkg scripts provided by system packages.

virtualenv install

If you don't want to taint your system by develop method above and/or you want apkg isolated from the rest of your system, you can use virtualenv (python-virtualenv package on most distros):

git clone https://gitlab.nic.cz/packaging/apkg
cd apkg
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
python3 setup.py develop
apkg

You can enter the venv later/from other terminals by

source apkg/venv/bin/activate

You can also do this little trick inside venv to avoid conflicts with system apkg packages (assuming ~/bin is in your $PATH):

source apkg/venv/bin/activate
ln `which apkg` ~/bin/apkg-dev
apkg-dev

usage

Simply run

apkg

to get summary of available commands (equivalent of apkg --help).

Use --help/-h after a command to get help for that particular command instead:

apkg status --help

contact

Use gitlab issues to communicate anything you have in mind. Feedback is most appreciated!

planned features

• docs
• tests
• packaging
• much more