Packaging Wizard

Packaging Wizard (PWIZ) is a project of a software wizard, which guides through whole packaging process. It is intended for both experienced and inexperienced users.

About

Packaging is a work, which combines very sophisticated and mechanical tasks. Most of those mechanical tasks can be fully automated. This is a main goal of Packaging Wizard (PWIZ). Other interesting aspects of Packaging Wizard project are increasing package quality - preventing simple mistakes and chance to create package by inexperienced user. In future, package maintainer should not spend his/her time in repeated solution of trivial problems.

Like other wizards, it helps user to undertake through this process. If PWIZ finds a mechanical actions, then it performs it, if it finds need for qualified action, it asks human.

Feedback is welcome. Especially following feedback is expected in current phase:

News

2006-04-21
Version 0.04.1 - Ported. Works with latest glibc, wget and Sourceforge engine.
2005-04-12
Version 0.04 - Download and build. Searching web, download and build configure based programs and perl modules.
2004-12-13
Project announce for SuSE developers.
2004-12-07
Version 0.03.1 - The Proof of Concept. Show possible future direction of packaging work.

Screenshots

PWIZ is now a console application. See more in PWIZ in action.

Current state

PWIZ is now ready for testing. In current state, PWIZ can create spec file and RPM package from configure based project, if there are no problems during packaging. Packager has to add neededforbuild tag manually, the rest of spec file should be correct.

Implemented parts:

Work in progress:

Planned features:

Documentation

Introduction to Packaging Wizard
This document describes basic usage and principles of Packaging Wizard.
PWIZ for Developers
Basic developer documentation of PWIZ internal structure.

Download

You can download PWIZ here.

Historic documents

Previous name for it is Automatic package manager. There are older documents on it:

Automatic package manager
Automatic package manager is a project for automation of packager's work. New implementation should be flexible and powerfull packager tool. (2003)
Automatic packaging
OpenOffice Presentation for SuSE Engineering Workshop Nürnberg 2003

Work on Automatic package manager was based on my previous source-based build systems.

OSBuilder
My former build shell project already contained tool creating package based on build description independent on version and sources available on local disc. (2000-2002)
UTX's build own GNU-Linux
My original build tool set study was a proof of possibility to create a tool able to fetch sources and apply changes independent on actually packaged version. (1998-2000)