Packaging Wizard (PWIZ) is a project of a software wizard, which guides through whole packaging process. It is intended for both experienced and inexperienced users.
Packaging is a work, which combines very sophisticated and mechanical tasks. Most of those mechanical tasks can be fully automated. This is a main goal of Packaging Wizard (PWIZ). Other interesting aspects of Packaging Wizard project are increasing package quality - preventing simple mistakes and chance to create package by inexperienced user. In future, package maintainer should not spend his/her time in repeated solution of trivial problems.
Like other wizards, it helps user to undertake through this process. If PWIZ finds a mechanical actions, then it performs it, if it finds need for qualified action, it asks human.
Feedback is welcome. Especially following feedback is expected in current phase:
Are questions understandable for users? Is there any "killer place", when user cannot continue.
Basic information missing in documentation.
Bad balance of guess quality, question importance etc.
Bad initial automatic guess.
Failure due to lack of feature.
PWIZ is now a console application. See more in PWIZ in action.
PWIZ is now ready for testing. In current state, PWIZ can create spec file and RPM package from configure based project, if there are no problems during packaging. Packager has to add neededforbuild tag manually, the rest of spec file should be correct.
Implemented parts:
Searching in FTP archives, WWW pages and at Sourceforge and Freshmeat archives.
Packages using GNU configure based build system and perl modules.
Special support for GNOME related stuff.
Filelists, file list simplification.
SuSE RPM packaging.
Work in progress:
Undo, backstepping.
Extras menu for better control.
Failure analysis.
Planned features:
Update existing packages keeping all existing patches and build steps.
Preferences editor.
Automatic BuildRequires / neededforbuild.
Better support for scriptlets (%pre, %preun, %post, %postun).
More package types.
Spec file analysis.
Build in chroot environment.
Support for more RPM tags, suid binaries.
Desktop file wizard, mime type wizard.
You can download PWIZ here.
Previous name for it is Automatic package manager. There are older documents on it:
Work on Automatic package manager was based on my previous source-based build systems.