BSDCan2011 - Final (with audio).5
BSDCan 2011
The Technical BSD Conference
| Speakers | |
|---|---|
|
Kris Moore |
| Schedule | |
|---|---|
| Day | Talks - 1 - 2011-05-13 |
| Room | DMS 1140 |
| Start time | 10:00 |
| Duration | 01:00 |
| Info | |
| ID | 215 |
| Language used for presentation | English |
The PBI format re-implemented for FreeBSD and PC-BSD
PBI9
The PBI format (Push Button Installer) has been the default package management system for PC-BSD going on 5+ years now. However as we looked to the future it became apparent that it was greatly needing an overhaul to both improve its functionality, and expand its usage outside the scope of just PC-BSD. Among the areas needing improvement were how it dealt with identical libraries between applications, the heavy requirements from being implemented in QT/KDE, and lack of a digital verification mechanism.
Starting in April of 2010, work began on re-implementing the PBI format to address these issues, and greatly expand upon its usefulness as a package management system for both PC-BSD and FreeBSD. From this work the pbi-manager was born as a subset of command-line functionality for dealing with every aspect of PBIs, from building, installing, distribution and advanced management. The resulting format has been implemented 100% in shell, allowing it to run virtually unmodified on a fresh FreeBSD system, as well as be agnostic towards which desktop a particular user may be running in PC-BSD. Features such as digital signature verification, intelligent library sharing, repository management, bsdiff updating and others have already been implemented, along with improved QT4-based front-ends, which behave and look almost identical to the legacy format. The end result is a powerful package format which can be used for traditional FreeBSD users as well as PC-BSD running any window manager, or none for that matter.