Beginning of 'Packaging Infrastructure' Contract

Anyone following the "haiku-inc" ML will have noticed that I've been approved to spend 240 hours (around 6 weeks of full-time work) on Haiku's packaging infrastructure. This mostly means I'll be working on the package building system, which will manage the "HaikuPorts" package repository, ensuring it's up-to-date across architectures (and later, across both nightly & release builds).

As those who have been paying close attention to IRC may already know, Alexander already has created a prototype server & client in Ruby. However, in discussions with Alex, Oliver, and Axel, there is a consensus that the client (at least) needs to be rewritten in Python, as Ruby on Haiku is too unstable for our needs. The server may also be rewritten as well, as we determined that it doesn't support nearly enough of what it needs to, and a rewrite to Python may be easy enough. We'll see.

My contract officially starts today, but I'm going to be out for most of the day, so I won't start working full-time until tomorrow. For this week, I expect to get the Python client software into a "mostly working" state, and make a decision on what to do about the server and probably start working on that as well.

I'll be posting end-of-the-week progress reports just as Adrien did for the duration of my contract right here on my blog. Stay tuned!