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.