Hello!
I am currently planning to write open source package manager to and accompanying build system to mac os. The idea is identical to the build and package system of SUSE/openSUSE.
The packager creates a repository (a collection of RPMs) and adds other repositories as dependencies. When an RPM is built, it is built inside a container with only access to what was listed as Build Requirements, which it can only grab from the current project, and the dependent repositories. It then publishes the rpms and source rpms. A plan would also be a way of deriving pkg installers by finding the transitive closure of dependencies, giving devs a very clean option for more traditional packaging.
There are a few reasons that this improves upon brew:
- Applications built with this method cannot depend on things that aren't packaged and accessible.
- It is far easier to port RPMs over from linux
- RPMs can be signed, this would be enforced
- It is nice and easy to host your own third party RPM repository without constantly monitoring dependencies.
- It's a more unix-y way to built pkgs
The only issue is that the whole idea is based around being able to whip up a chroot/docker like environment based on Mac OS. Without this, we don't get any guarantees that we are only building against other RPMs that are accessible to the user. But I cannot find any container systems for mac os
There was a way of constructing chroots, but not since big sur? Is there an FOSS project for creating containers, or maybe an apple mandated way that I could achieve this?