OpenPKG (Was back to Ubuntu 8.04)

[Bill Campbell]

...
>That's an excellent idea. Would you care to open a new thread with
>more details about how you utilize OpenPKG?

For openers here's some documentation and an overview I put up
years ago:

	http://www.celestial.com/support/Documentation/openpkg/

>Is OpenPKG as the name implies and open (FOSS) package?

Yes, with the caveat that the're an OpenPKG foundation that
maintains formal release levels while the public versions are the
most current, and possibly developmental versions.

The Prime Mover behind OpenPKG is Ralf S. Engelschall, author of
apache mod_rewrite amongst other things.

The last time I looked, the kolab project is built on OpenPKG.

We use it on all our in-house and customer systems, and have been
since our move from Caldera years ago.  Before moving to OpenPKG
we made fairly extensive modifications to the vendor's packages
to keep things like CPAN modules current when we needed more
recent versions than the distribution provided.  The problem with
this was that either we had to forego the vendor's updates, or
spend a lot of time backing our mods into them.

I have been using a lot of open source software for decades, to
the point that Richard Stallman would probably say that we were
running GNU/Xenix back in the day.

I happened to read an article on OpenPKG by Ralf in SysAdmin
magazine while I was in the process of deciding where to go after
leaving Caldera, and it looked interesting.

Since moving to OpenPKG for this, my life has gotten a lot easier
as we can have the current (and in some cases not-so-bleeding-edge)
versions of packages on all our systems without breaking the
vendor's updates.  This also has a big advantage when supporting
older systems with current software.  We have clients running
things as old as SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 on 10 year old hardware, and
Linux systems back to eDesktop 2.4, all running the Latest &
Greatest versions of rsync, openssh, and similar necessities.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
Voice:          (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
Fax:            (206) 232-9186

The pinnacle of open systems is: when moving from vendor to vendor, the
design flaws stay the same.