WARNING! This project is stalled. It was never finished and is not under current development.

Simple Robot(s) Package Manager (srpm)

Software projects are built on top of dependent projects. In addition good software design suggests building software in modules that are easily testable. The Simple Robots Package Manager is a lightweight and distributed package manager to bring these dependencies into the build.

srpm is designed to be lightweight by making it build agnostic. The build system should call the package manager to import the desired dependencies. A config file specifies which dependencies to import and the directory to put them into. All dependencies, including recursive release dependencies are merged into the target directory. This implies that packages include a standard structure so they can be merged correctly. In order to handle dependencies in a distributed way, packages are identified by a url to a release package, which contains both the latest configuration file as well as the latest binary release. Each package has a name. When a local package exists with this name, it will be used instead of the release version.

To remain lightweight, srpm does not provide many of the features provided by other package managers such as Maven, Gradle, Conan.io. srpm does not integrate with any build systems, manage artifacts directly, support multiple variations on a build, manage multiple versions of a component, or handle recursive dependencies. In addition, it only runs on linux.

Package Configuration

Package configuration files are written in json. (non-optimal, but flexible enough for future features). An example configuration file that will import jsoncpp and libcurl packages into the build/deps directory. Additional targets can be defined, and each will receive a copy of the dependent packages. This allows pulling different dependency trees for different parts of the build. A special target, "release" specifies that the dependency is also loaded when the package is loaded. For example, if a c++ library depended on another c++ library, it would include both build and release dependencies to ensure that users of the library would include both transitive dependencies.

{
  "name": "package-manager",
  "location": "https://github.com/simplerobot/package-manager/releases/latest/download/package.zip",
 
  "release": "build/release",
  "freshness-file": "build/dependencies.make",
  
  "targets": [
    {
      "name": "test",
      "dir": "build/test/deps",
    },
    {
      "name": "main",
      "dir": "build/main/deps",
    },
  ],
  
  "dependencies":
  [
    {
      "name": "srpm-jsoncpp",
      "location": "https://github.com/simplerobot/srpm-jsoncpp/releases/latest/download/package.zip",
      "targets": [ "test", "main" ],
    },
    {
      "name": "srpm-libcurl",
      "url": "https://github.com/simplerobot/srpm-libcurl/releases/latest/download/package.zip",
      "targets": [ "test", "main" ],
    },
    {
      "name": "test-cpp-lib",
      "url": "https://github.com/simplerobot/test-cpp-lib/releases/latest/download/package.zip",
      "targets": [ "test" ],
    },
  ],
}

When developing software you may want to override a package while making a change. srpm is typically run in the top directory of a project. If the parent directory contains a file with the name .srpm that srpm file will be used instead. If the parent directory contains a directory, then the local release will be used instead.

Running

Command line options:

srpm --help                           Prints help
srpm [<project-file>] [--load]        Loads dependencies

Configuration

Files:

package.srpm         default package file name
~/.srpm/config       configuration file
~/.srpm/cache/       cached dependencies

Configuration File:

{
  "cache-dir": "~/.srpm/cache/",
  "cache-valid-seconds": "300",
  "servers" : [
    {
      "host": "git.simplerobots.com",
      "client-cert": "~/.srpm/simplerobots.cert.pem",
      "client-key": "~/.srpm/simplerobots.key.pem",
    },
  ],
}

Integrating with make

To ensure all the loaded dependencies are visible in a Makefile, the include needs to ensure that Make reloads after running srpm. We do this by including the freshness file as a makefile.

build/dependencies.make : FORCE
	srpm project.srpm
include build/dependencies.make
FORCE :