“rPath is a young company that is rapidly becoming a leader in
package management innovation. At a time when traditional package
management systems such as APT and dpkg or Yum and RPM are adding
elements such as signed packages and plugins, and projects such as
Autopackage and Zero Install are focusing on easy-to-use interfaces
and giving ordinary users the ability to install desktop
applications, rPath takes a top-down approach and focuses on
simplifying release management.“rPath’s goal, according to a white paper on the company Web
site, is ‘a source control system married to a package system.’ To
achieve this goal, rPath has developed three closely related
projects: Conary, a package management system; rPath Linux; and
rBuilder, a tool for working with Conary repositories. With these
projects, rPath claims to be able to drastically reduce the time
required to build a Linux release…”