I must apologize to you poor Lynx users who are stuck actually looking at these stupid links. These are just SpamBait and are invisible to all us GUI bastards. The idea is that robots trawling web sites for email addresses will get hung up trying to follow all these WPoison links. Sorry. -robin
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5Sight Logo "Men are unemployed, not because there is no useful work to do, but because a profit cannot at the moment be made from that work. There is always a job to do in a community just as there is always a job to do in the home."
- Tom Brown, Syndicalism

The ReOS Manager is a software package manager for BeOS, designed to be the core around which we will build ReOS, a full (Linux-style) distribution of the new child-of-BeOS as new and replacement components are developed to replace the version sold to Palm, Inc. as Be, Inc. would down.

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ReOS Manager Overview

The Manager is conceptually derived from the way *BSD Unix systems manage their Ports collections (in "/usr/src"). Generally, the ports directory is a local checkout of the main CVS repository maintained by a dedicated team. This directory contains files which tell the local system where to find distribution files, how to download and process them and how to install or uninstall them. This makeds it remarkably easy to install software and to keep these instalations current.

The ReOS Manager uses a directory of package description files (updated via CVS through an SSH tunnel) which describe software packages and how to install and uninstall them. To install a package, it calls a set of Perl scripts, which use Wget to download the actual software package from its home site, and then installs it. For installing the ReOS system itself, as Perl cannot be depended toexist on a stock BeOS install, we use sh scripts to install: the /boot/reos directory, WGet, CVS, Perl, SSH and the ReOS Manager.

Categories and Such

The packages repository is a heirarchical directory structure, the levels of which are known in the Manager code as category, subCategory, app and version. For example, the Perl package resedes in "devtools/languages/Perl/5.5.3r0"; for this package, these labels are:

  • category - devtools
  • subCategory - languages
  • app - Perl
  • version - 5.5.3r0
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5Sight is a collective venture; a collaboration between users and developers. All material produced by 5Sight Developers for the Collective is copyright by 5Sight Development Collective; please see the relevant LICENSE file for more information. These documents are © 2002.

last modified 2002-02-26