Perforce streams - a new feature in Perforce (not yet released)

Perforce is coming up with a new feature called "streams". Not mentioned when it will be released. But they are promoting that, this feature will enhances branch management and reduces merge issues.

What is a stream?

                A stream describes about branch like depot location, owner, it's parent branch and more. It is a branching and merging application based on the perforce system.

Notable features:

·         Streams provide a centralized control to manage project related workspaces. Just setup one stream view and link your workspace to that stream.

                Whenever stream view changes, it automatically update workspace views.

·         Streams can be used to compute sensible defaults for merges
·         P4V is being enhanced to show streams in a slick visual flowchart, and to offer a simple interface for sophisticated stream tasks.

The current available details about this feature can be obtained from these links

http://blog.perforce.com/blog/?p=2948

&

http://blog.perforce.com/blog/?p=2951
and
Streams a Tiny tutorial

ESP package manager

EPM (ESP package manager), is the second package manager, which I used. In my previous organization Synopsys, I used Synopsys Installer, which is an internal package management tool used only in Synopsys. But it is good to know EPM is a free package manager developed by Easy software products.

The design goal of EPM is to solve the problem of software distribution with Unix/Linux OS. The problem is every OS supports it's own packaging tools and each has unique requirements for the software development environment. EPM provides solution to this problem by providing it's own portable distribution format and also vendor specific formats like rpm, depot, dpkg, pkgadd, etc. This allows you to build software distribution files for any OS from the same sources.

You can download EPM from http://www.epmhome.org/ and the EPM book at http://www.epmhome.org/documentation.php teaches you how to use EPM.

EPM requires few pre-installed softwares. They are C compiler, make utility, Bourne (or Korn or bash) shell and gzip. The optional Graphical setup program requires a C++ compiler, FLTK library. End user systems require Bourne shell, df, tar & gzip utilities to install portable distributions.

Basically EPM reads one or more software list files that describe a single software package. These list files needs to be written in specific format, Chapter 3 of EPM book explains it in detail.

To build a software package, epm program is used. For example to build a portable software package for an application called foo, type the following command
epm foo
This expects a list file by name foo.list. If your list file is created with different name, then you can mention the list file name by command line argument as
epm foo base.list

You can install the portable packages by calling an installation script product.install where product is the name of the package.
cd os-release-arch
./product.install
After answering few yes/no questions, product will be installed.

To create vendor specific packages use -f option
epm -f rpm foo base.list

EPM also supports preinstall, postinstall, prepatch, postpatch, preremove & postremove scripts. These scripts are bourne shell scripts, needs to be called from list file
It also supports init scripts and also patch software distributions.

For detailed usage refer EPM book at http://www.epmhome.org/documentation.php

Enjoy building software packages with EPM ..... :)

Software Packaging Formats

Software Packaging Formats (Reference - s/w distribution using ESP)
In Unix there are many open source packaging systems, it is always better to have a list and to compare among them.

Format	Operating Systems1	Binaries	Cross- Platform	Patches	Up- grades	Con- flicts	Re- quires	Re- places	Config Files	Map Files	Un- install
installp	AIX	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
pkg_add	FreeBSD	Yes	Yes2	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes
pkg_add	NetBSD OpenBSD	Yes	Yes2	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
dpkg	Corel Linux Debian GNU/Linux	Yes	Yes2	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
depot	HP-UX	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
inst	IRIX	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Install.app	MacOS X	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No
pkgadd	Solaris	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
rpm	Mandrake Red Hat SuSE TurboLinux	Yes	Yes2	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes
setld	Tru64 UNIX	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
slackware	Slackware Linux	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes