A big merge: Listaller & Autopackage

The Listaller project was started in 2007/2008 to create a unified software management solution and to provide a generic package format which works on all Linux distributions. The much older Autopackage project also had the same goal to provide a unified cross-distro software installation solution.

Over the years a lot of projects tried to become the global standard for software installations on Linux, today we don’t have at least one outstanding “superior” cross-distro package format (except source tarballs :-P). Instead users still have to interact with the package management and install native RPM/DEB/TGZ packages, which often causes problems. A lot of projects only offer source code tarballs too. So Jan Niklas, the project leader of Autopackage, and I talked about this and other problems. We both have less active contributors at time and Autopackage developement nearly stopped within this year. As consequence of those problems, we now announce the merge of Autopackage into Listaller.

We will do a complete review of the IPK format and make it ready to be accepted by distributors, which do criticize alternative software installers a lot. The new package format should have a good quality, be flexible and secure so that distributors are happy with it. The binary Autopackage package format will not be developed further, but it will receive some maintainance patches.

We will take nearly all of the Autopackage tools like apbuild and integrate them into the Listaller system, so users can easily use those tools from Listaller applications.

We also have planned a lot more interesting tasks. If you want to join the new team, feel free to contact me or Jan.