LPMtool 0.50 review

LPMtool project is a package management tool

License: W3C License File size: 0K Developer: Sam Varshavchik

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LPMtool project is a package management tool. At this time, LPMtool has been developed and tested on Linux. LPMtool could probably be ported to other platforms with a minimum of effort, but at this time no porting effort has been made.

LPMtool is capable of handling all package management chores for an entire Linux system by itself; but it can also play second fiddle alongside the existing system package manager.

LPMtool is not just a basic package manager, that merely keeps track of installed software. LPMtool includes tools for setting up web-based package repositories and publishing packages.

LPMtool publishes an efficient package repository on a web server. The package repository may contain different versions of the same software package built for different Linux distributions, and LPMtool will download the appropriate version, for the Linux distribution LPMtool is running on.

LPMtool aims to simply the task of distributing and installing software packages. Consider a complicated application that uses additional software components from third party sources. LPMtool eliminates the "dependency hell" of pouring through the software's documentation looking for third party components the software depends on, and figuring out if you already have them installed, and if not where they must be downloaded from.

LPMtool downloads the required software components, automatically, after displaying the third party software's URL and asking for permission to download the required software from it (of course, the third party components must also be built with LPMtool, in order for this to work).

LPMtool keeps a list of known repositories where software was installed from. A single command checks if newer versions of existing software packages are available, downloads them, and installs them.

Here are some key features of "LPMtool":
A more flexible dependency model. New versions of a package can use a different architecture (such as updating an i686 package to an x86_64 package, or the other way around). Also, it is not necessary to "bump" a package's release after upgrading to a new version of the base Linux distribution. LPMtool knows to update packages built for a different (previous) Linux distribution even if the current distribution carries an older version of the package.
No configuration files that require manual editing. All configuration settings are adjusted by command options.
LPMtool includes a lot of documentation. This documentation includes everything needed to use LPMtool, and to set up web-pased package repositories to publish LPMtool packages on the web. This documentation also briefly discusses many internal LPMtool objects and algorithms.
LPMtool includes a graphical front-end (requires Gnome and Python).

Requirements:
PyGTK
python-gtkhtml