Dark Horse Package Management Components: DPM and DON

After a short contest to find a name, there’s a definitive winner.

The winner is Marc Wolf, of Longview, Washington — who suggested DPM, standing for Dark Horse Package Manager, as both a tool and a format name.

As to the network repository interaction component that wraps it, this will be called DON, standing for DPM over Network.

So, for example, to install a package, envision:

dpm -iv ./Audacity-3.7.1-2.x86_64.dpm

Or, if you wanted to pull it from a repository:

don install Audacity

As you may have already noticed, the interfaces will be familiar at face value to those who are used to enterprise environments.

I’d like to give out a special thanks to all the people who participated in the naming contest, as there was a deluge of submissions to consider, and honestly, I feel like most of them were great, viable product names so it was hard to choose!

In terms of next steps, I feel that making it distro-agnostic is the right approach and is consistent with the development process of everything else built so far, so I will launch a separate project site for DPM and DON.

It will eventually include utilities to:

  • load the RPMDB to DPM-native stores to take over as package manager for RPM-based distributions
  • convert RPMs to DPM format
  • load the /var/lib/dpkg tree to DPM-native stores to take over as package manager for DEB-based distributions
  • convert DEBs to DPM format

I might include other package manager database conversion utilities later.

I feel that using this approach will give DPM/DON full system lifecycle capability in a context more broad than just a small package manager, without having to spend a great deal more energy on building it.

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