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.