Universal packaging tool (for pypi, cpan, ruby, ...)

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

Last week I was sitting in cafeteria with the author of a new python
package "upt" (Universal packaging tool) whose aim is to provide
automatic conversion from one of the repositories like pypi, cpan,
ruby gems, npm, ... into any other package manager.

    https://framagit.org/upt
    https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/package_software_with_upt/

I have a proof-of-concept backend written for python ports, but I
still need to clean it up a bit and write installation rules before
publishing (I had no time last week to finish tho work). Some of the
required functionality in upt was also just implemented now.

For us this could at some point replace pypi2port & cpan2port (less
important), but more importantly we have no such tool for ruby gems (I
believe?), and maybe someone would write a frontend for npm or another
tricky "package manager" one day.

What's currently not implemented are non-python / non-perl
dependencies, and an easy way to upgrade (it can create the package
for the first time, but if you make lots of changes, it doesn't know
how to "merge" the manual changes with changes in the upstream
package).

Mojca