OpenPKG releases version 2.4 of its software packaging facility

The OpenPKG project has released version 2.4 of its software, which is another evolutionary step after eight releases in four years. The unique OpenPKG architecture leverages proven technologies like Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) and OSSP and GNU components to establish a unified software administration environment, independent of the underlying Unix operating system. This release was created by the newly established OpenPKG Foundation e.V., which contributed a substantial amount of manpower and technical resources making up the 'buildfarm' and development environment for the release engineers. Since the previous release four months ago, the OpenPKG package repository has grown again by 15%. A subset of 562 packages were carefully selected for inclusion into the OpenPKG 2.4 release, including the latest versions of popular Open Source Unix software like Apache, Bash, BIND, GCC, INN, Mozilla Firefox, MySQL, OpenSSH, Perl, Postfix, PostgreSQL, Samba, Squid, teTeX and Vim. Major technical efforts for this release were spent on migrating the whole development and release engineering environment to the new OpenPKG Foundation infrastructure, porting OpenPKG to IBM AIX 5.1 and enhancing the Solaris 10 and Debian 3.1 support.

OpenPKG 2.4 is available for 16 different Unix platforms. Most notably, it is supported on FreeBSD 5.4, NetBSD 2.0.2, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, Fedora Core 3, SUSE Linux 9.3, and Sun Solaris 9 and 10. Additionally, all CORE and the vast majority of BASE class packages are already available for the tentative platforms FreeBSD 6.0, Gentoo Linux 1.6.12 and Mandriva Linux 10.2. It is also still available for the obsolete platforms Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Sun Solaris 8 and FreeBSD 4.11. Finally, OpenPKG is also known to work under IBM AIX 5.1, HP HP-UX 11.11 and MacOS X 10.3.