Project-builder.org

Project-Builder.org, a.k.a. pb, is a free continuous packaging solution, helping building continuously multiple OS packages from sources.
Continuous packaging is to packaging what continuous integration is to integration, a way to produce packages early and always as a delivery mean. With the increasing role of FLOSS in enterprise, some development techniques linked to it also know a momentum. Continuous integration (shared sources repository, automatic build, automatic test) is such an example. The new process called continuous packaging should still be promoted and developed as best practice for industry.
More than 90% of users and admins prefer to install packages rather than tar files or content from a (D)VCS (from comparing download statistics on SourceForge between source and pre-packaged top 10 projects). But packages don't necessarily follow the development stream of projects, to package alpha, beta. Giving the possibility for projects to distribute seamlessly packages for whatever step of their development is clearly a gain for the whole community.
Project-Builder.org is a new GPL v2 tool designed to help projects developers producing easily packages for multiple OS and architectures, on a regular basis, from a single source repository.
The various aspects covered by the tool are:
* only produce software packages (ease integration in deployment servers, provide inheritance mecanisms, and Virtual Machines (VM) or Environments (VE a.k.a. chroot))
* ease the various steps of solution life cycle (controlled impact of installation/uninstallation, dependencies management, identical deliveries up to the customer, announce management, web site delivery, metadata management)
* help new projects in the provisioning of packages (templates and skeletons for the various supported OS, generated structure, help in VM/VE build)
* Avoid code or metadata duplication, as well as has no impact on the original project (macro system, separate repository)
* Neutral in term of Unix based environment (repository, system, package type agnostic)
These features help reducing the development cost by providing a process, method and tools to realize continuous packaging during the whole project life cycle.
Today the tool supports:
* Multiple repository (none - a.k.a. tar balls, SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, SVK...)
* Multiple systems (RPM Linux (Red Hat, RHEL, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSuSE, SLES, Mandriva), deb Linux (Debian, Ubuntu), ebuild Linux (Gentoo), pkg Solaris/OpenSolaris, ...)
* Multiple build environments (local, VM - QEMU, KVM, ..., VE - rpmbootstrap, mock, rinse, debootstrap, ...)
* Multiple repository manager (yum, urpmi, apt, ...)
and this at various phasis (development, test, integration, delivery)
It's part of the vcs-pkg.org initiative and is available from CPAN
It has been presented at the RMLL and FOSDEM
It supports Linux (i386, x86_64, ia64) and Solaris (i386, Sparc). It's packaged with itself for multiple distributions (Red Hat, RHEL, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSuSE, SLES, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo), Solaris. And helps packaging other projects such as MondoRescue, LinuxCOE.
According to Ohloh, Project-Builder.org development is worth more than $1M.

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