dcreager / buzzy

OS-agnostic package builder

Buzzy package manager

Buzzy is a package manager that isn't tied to one particular operating system or distribution. It's useful for third-party software developers that would like to provide native binary packages for the software that they write, without having to maintain separate packaging scripts for a multitude of operating systems, distributions, and versions.

Buzzy is currently alpha software, and only supports the following operating systems:

• Arch Linux
• RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6
• Mac OS X (using Homebrew)

We plan to add support for other Linux distributions and operating systems.

Buzzy is written in C, with all of its library dependencies included in the source repository. Then means that you don't need any language runtimes to build, install, or use Buzzy. (This is especially useful, since we don't have to worry about juggling language versions across different operating systems. I'm looking at you, Python on RHEL5!)

Installing Buzzy

We use Buzzy to build native packages of Buzzy itself. (It would be kind of lame of us not to, don't you think?) You can find binary package releases at our Github releases page. So the easiest way to install Buzzy is to download one of those binaries and install it using your normal package manager. Buzzy (purposefully) has no runtime dependencies, so the single binary is all you need.

Buzzy supports installing packages on a Mac using Homebrew. If you have Homebrew installed, you can install Buzzy using the following command:

$ brew install https://raw.github.com/dcreager/buzzy/master/spec/buzzy.rb

Building Buzzy

Presumably, your platform is one that Buzzy can build native packages for. (Otherwise, what's the point of installing Buzzy?) You can build your own native Buzzy package in two stages.

First, follow a standard CMake setup to build a "bootstrap" copy of Buzzy:

$ mkdir .build
$ cd .build
$ cmake ..
$ make

Then use this bootstrap copy to build and install a proper native package of Buzzy:

$ src/buzzy install

Overview

A Buzzy package is a platform-agnostic description of a piece of software. It usually includes instructions for downloading and building the software from source, but doesn't have to — Buzzy packages can also refer to packages that are available in your native package database.

Unlike most package managers, you do not have an arbitrary scripting language to work with when writing a Buzzy package description. Instead, a recipe is a declarative description of the software package, encoded in a YAML file.

Buzzy automatically translates this descriptive description of the software into one or more platform-specific packages. Different platforms might have different rules for how many packages are created for a recipe, and will certainly have different rules and customs for translating the descriptive recipe instructions into the native packaging format. Where possible, we use native system packages to satisfy recipe dependencies, rather that building our own custom copies of software that's already provided by the native package manager.