Introduction
The goals of the ADA package management system are to enable users and applications
to locate software packages installed at a site and to enable users and service to
request installation if a required package is not already present.
Proposed interface
Here is the proposal for a package management command line
interface called pkgmgr. Applications running on worker nodes rely on this interface
to locate software and are responsible for appropriately configuring their environment
based on these locations.
Pkgmgr
The pkgmgr project, supported by Grigori Rybkine, has provided a simple implementation
called pkgmgr_simple that records the local installations in a local database.
See the
pkgmgr home page.
This implementation does not yet support installation. Software is installed by some
other mechanism and then registered in the pkgmgr_simple database.
Pacman
ATLAS uses pacman to install its releases and it would be natural to use pacman to
install the ADA software including DIAL and its externals. However ADA installs
and registers packages so that they can be shared by multiple releases rather than
reinstalling all software fore each release as is done for ATLAS. There are also
issues with package naming and the meaning of the "location" of a package.
The pkgmgr project plans to provide a pacman implementation of pkgmgr once these
issues are resolved.
See the Pacman home page for information about Pacman.