# About Project-Builder.org

## What is Project-Builder.org ?

We are strong proponents of the concept of Continuous Packaging. Project-Builder.org aka pb helps building continuously multiple OS packages from sources.

With the increasing role of FLOSS in enterprises, some development techniques linked to it also know a momentum. Continuous integration (shared sources repository, automatic build, automatic test) is such an example. The new process called Continuous Packaging should still be promoted and developed as best practice for industry.

Project-Builder.org is a new GPL v2 tool designed to help projects developers producing easily packages for multiple OS and architectures, on a regular basis, from a single source repository. 90% (from stats of sf.net) of users and admins prefer to install packages rather than tar files or content from a [D]VCS. But packages don't necessarily follow the development stream of projects, to package alpha, beta versions. Giving the possibility for projects to distribute seamlessly packages for whatever step of their development is clearly a gain for the whole community.

The various aspects covered by the tool are:

- only produce software packages (ease integration in deployment servers, provide inheritance mecanisms, and Virtual Machines (VM) or Environments (VE) as well as Remote Machines (RM))
- ease the various steps of solution life cycle (controlled impact of installation/uninstallation, dependencies management, identical deliveries up to the customer, announce management, web site delivery, metadata management)
- help new projects in the provisioning of packages (templates and skeletons for the various supported OS, generated structure, help in VM/VE/RM build)
- Avoid code or metadata duplication, as well as has no impact on the original project (macro system, separate repository)
- Neutral in term of Unix environment (repository, system, package type agnostic)

These features help reducing the development cost by providing a process, methods and tools to realize continuous packaging during the whole project life cycle. Today the tool supports:

- Muliple repository (none - aka tar balls, SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, SVK...)
- Multiple systems (RPM Linux - Red Hat, SuSE, Mandriva, ..., deb Linux - Debian, Ubuntu, ..., ebuild - Gentoo, pkg Solaris/OpenSolaris, ...)
- Multiple build environments (local, VM - QEMU, KVM, ..., VE - rpmbootstrap, mock, rinse, debootstrap, RM - ssh...)
- Multiple repository manager (yum, urpmi, apt, ...)

and this, at various phases (development, test, integration, delivery).

It aims at becoming a tool for the vcs-pkg.org initiative. It's today used for projects as diverse as FOSSology, MondoRescue, LinuxCOE, Meganizer, GOsa² (in study), itself, ...

## Project-Builder.org References

TBD

We also have freshmeat, entries.

## Who is behind Project-Builder.org ?

Who is in the Project-Builder.org?

Bruno Cornec
Lead development, maintenance, documentation, web site, rpm packaging, Mandriva packaging

Bryan Gartner
Ideas contributor, bug reporter

Joachim Langenbach
Ideas contributor, bug reporter

## Who has been behind Project-Builder.org ?

Who has been in the Project-Builder.org?

Nobody as the project is too young for that ;-)

## Artwork of this site

"I think I've already seen your look and feel somewhere"

### Graphics made by Alexis Younes (Ayo73) and Amaury Amblard-Ladurantie

These 2 incredible guys have accepted to let us reuse the design they made for the not less incredible game Frozen Bubble. Many thanks guys ! Just hope Mondo Rescue will help you some days as much as I played to frozen bubble myself :-)

Don't miss Ayo's site at 73lab.com as it provides all his artworks, some of them reusable.

## The Project-Builder.org Community

There are too few people involved at the moment. But that shouldn't refrain you from participating !

### Sponsors

These people/entities helped financially the development of Project-Builder.org:

HP, Intel

### Contributors

These people helped technically the development of Project-Builder.org:

## The Project-Builder.org Coopetitors

Project-Builder.org was first created because there was nothing like it available at that time under a free license. Under the vcs-pkg.org initiative, you may find other projects whose goals are aligned with those of Project-Builder.org. Especially you should look at the OpenSUSE Build Service as another interesting build tool.

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