Cross-Platform Unix Software Packaging
Facts and Features
IT Managers
System Administrators
Package Developers
  • Cost reduction
    The unified approach of OpenPKG allows your cross-platform Unix system administration costs to be reduced substantially. Industry experiences show that a factor of 50% is expectable. With OpenPKG your resources can be freed and your efforts can be spent on important service improvements instead of wasting them for tedious system administration tasks.

  • Open source software
    OpenPKG is Open Source software. You don't have to pay any license fees but nevertheless receive a high quality application framework created by qualified software developers which also have decades of experiences in Unix system administrators.

  • High quality consistent installation
    Your engineers need no experience in porting software packages. They just install the software packages and concentrate on their primary task of configuring the applications. This both makes your installations more consistent and reliable and speeds up your business.

  • Multiple instances
    Need virtual computing? OpenPKG is good for you! It can be installed more than once on a single system squeezing out everything the underlying device can offer. It even can be easily combined with other virtualization technologies like virtual machines, virtual systems or virtual namespaces.

  • Built-in porting knowledge
    Application packages were build by experienced software developers with a maximum of portability in mind. Take advantage of that free service and avoid that your engineers reinvent the wheel.

  • Cross platform
    OpenPKG most notably supports all important BSD, Linux and Sun Solaris flavors on Intel, AMD and SPARC CPUs. On any system the behavior of OpenPKG is exactly the same, so engineers using it will see an unified environment across all those platforms. This significantly reduces the complexities normally resulting from dissimilar systems. Have your engineers do application configuration rather than wasting time fighting against the differences between systems.

  • Minimum OS dependencies
    An OpenPKG installation has minimum dependencies to the underlying operating system. In fact, OpenPKG ignores most packages bundled with the OS. Withdraw any items from your customer meetings discussion list that favor one operating system over the other because of vendor supplied or omitted software packages. You're free now.
  • Signed packages
    Officially released OpenPKG packages are digitally signed. Verification of that signature makes any tampering on packages evident. Successful verification assures that any package you grabbed came from a trusted source and includes the content you expect without any damage or surprises inside.

  • Package integrity verification
    Files from already installed packages can be compared against the original package content. Check system integrity any time you like. Ensure your last filesystem check did not damage any files.

  • Self contained Packages
    An OpenPKG package contains either source code and meta instructions to create binaries or already the binaries to install the application. If the build or install process depends on other packages, OpenPKG will tell you about these dependencies and halt the process until you resolve the dependencies by installing related OpenPKG packages. For all of this you never have to touch the base operating system.

  • Support for unprivileged user
    Unless a package explicitly requires "root" privileges, i.e., a network daemon listening on an UDP/TCP port below 1024, an user can place a private instance of OpenPKG in any writable location like his home directory.

  • Arbitrary prefix
    Although OpenPKG binary packages are usually built for the hardcoded "/openpkg" filesystem prefix this is just a design decision. OpenPKG does not enforce this prefix at all. It can be configured for an arbitrary filesystem prefix during bootstrapping. If you choose a different prefix you can build your binaries for this prefix yourself -- which is just a matter of available CPU horsepower and source RPM download speed.

  • Multiple instances
    Isolating multiple installations and creating virtual servers is a snap. Just bootstrap OpenPKG into more than one location. We already got all the tweaks and quirks out of the packages. Assume network daemons will properly listen to configured non-wildcard addresses and applications log to their own, not to the common system, "var" area.

  • Minimum OS intrusion
    OpenPKG touches the operating system as less as possible. Only very few adjustments are being done related to user/group accounts, system startup and shutdown and periodic execution of commands.

  • Useful preconfiguration
    Package installations yield useful preconfigurations which allow immediate exploration or usage of an application while avoiding unnecessary security threats.

  • Uninstallable packages
    A OpenPKG package can be removed entirely from the system. Every static content is removed automatically while variable user data like configuration and databases survive deinstallation. Locating user data is easy due to the clean filesystem structure that OpenPKG enforces.

  • Powerful queries
    RPM already provides powerful query mechanisms allowing insight view to any package, list everything from textual description down to the attributes of a single file. Never again be in doubt what the original permissions of the file you just accidentally touched have been. OpenPKG has been designed to provide as many useful informations as query results as possible.

  • Run-command facility
    The run-command facility makes it easy to enable or disable, run, stop, restart or reload daemons. Best of all, it works consistent across all platforms.
  • Support for entire package lifecycle
    With OpenPKG you create packages from original tar-balls. You specify instructions how to fetch original sources and patches, commands to bundle everything together into a source RPM and list how to build a binary RPM. All instructions are placed in a single .spec file which is more or less a shell script.

  • Open source software
    OpenPKG is open source software. In the (unlikely) event you push it to the limits, have exhausted any documentation or suspect you found a bug you have full access to the source. This allows you to have an in-depth view behind the scenes and we won't stop you if you proceed and tailor OpenPKG to your needs.

  • Support for unprivileged user
    All packages can be build without having root access to the system.

  • Dependencies for build and runtime
    Source package include information for build dependencies and binary packages include information for install dependencies.

  • Clean and compact package specifications
    The one single .spec file is the ultimate source for any information regarding the package from user viewable description over compiler options to install targets. It's all there.

  • Run-command facility
    A powerful run-command facility unifies the startup and shutdown as well as the periodic (cron) scripting across all platforms. Every package has all necessary shell commands for actions related to run, stop, restart and reload daemons in a single file. Commands for periodic execution are placed there as well.