After a grueling couple of weeks, the initial first round of work on the first draft of the specification for the package management system that Dark Horse Linux will use is nearing completion.
There are still critical areas to document, but the overall design is close to finalization unless major problems are found during review.
As promised, I have moved that drafting effort to a dedicated site at
https://dpm.darkhorselinux.org/
A design specification like this often changes when development starts, so, things are subject to move around or be updated, but I think this has done a good job at removing the bloat that RPM+YUM have while still solving the core problems that RPM+YUM solve — and in some aspects improves on those systems, particularly in the auditability/security and reporting aspects.
DPM and DON intend to be moving away from Berkeley DB towards SQLite due to both dependency profiles and licensing problems associated with Berkeley DB that SQLite does not have, but, of course, that is also subject to change once rubber hits the road.
Thanks again to all the folks who let me bounce ideas off them while I was fleshing out pieces of this, and I’m excited to see this get developed and further refined.
While there’s still plenty to document, I don’t think there’s enough left to hold back starting the process of building the tools in the next iteration.