“At this time, there are two options for a good packaging
system with all the commonly-needed features: RPM and deb. The
Simple Packaging Kit, or SPK, is on a quest to make a third
option. Because of SPK’s current development state, new
features are always coming in, meaning that if we find features
that are needed to make SPK a viable “Third Option,” we can usually
add them without breaking anything.”
“An SPK package is simply a bzip2ed tarball with data and a
configuration file inside. This has its pros and cons, but seems to
work well in the end. A major con is that it is slow for querying
an SPK just to find its package name and description, because the
whole package must be decompressed before the configuration file
can be read. The configuration file itself is written in XML
because of the language’s flexibility and readability. SPK formerly
used environment variables from a bash script, but these became
awkward to read by hand in larger packages and illogical to use
after the SPK management software was switched to Perl.”
“SPK tries to split everything into categories. This way, the
user may choose not to install certain groups, such as documents or
man pages, simply by using an –exclude command. This is good for
people who are low on disk space. The major problem with this is
that the automatic SPK building tool (which automatically creates
an SPK from the contents of a specified directory) must assume
which category each file must be put into. It puts files into
categories based solely on what directory they’re in. We are
attempting to help fix this problem by having it make assumptions
on both the location and extension of the file. Eventually, a
graphical interface which allows the packager to place individual
files or directories into specific categories would be ideal, as
human intervention is necessary for 100% correct
categorization.”