[haiku-inc] Contract Proposal: Package Management

Greetings,

as Matt recently reminded me, Haiku, Inc. is still interested in contracting 
developers. Currently I find myself in a sitation where that would actually be 
possible for me. I believe package management is still the number one roadblock 
for R1 and after talking to Oliver a few days ago, I'm sure there's more than 
enough left to do to easily fill a month of full time work. So that seems to be 
an excellent task for contract work.

I propose to work 160 hours for a total amount of 2000 Euro (currently US 
$2869,50) on the Haiku package management solution and related tasks. This 
would include, though not be limited to, the following:

* Adjust the build system and tools to build and install the Haiku core system 
as a package.

* Extend the boot loader and the kernel to support booting off a partition with 
a packaged Haiku core system.

* Extend packagefs to provide symlinks for base paths of packages and their 
dependencies (needed for dealing with packages that hard-code absolute paths).

* Work on tools to build Haiku packages in a clean chroot environment.

* Adjust build "recipes" for HaikuPorts packages as needed and build the 
packages. A tool to check the package against packaging guidelines might need 
to be implemented.

* Extend packagefs to provide information about active packages to the tools 
that need it (e.g. the package solver).

* Implement the package solver (as Oliver proposed based on libsatsolver).

* Extend the package kit and the (CLI) package manager to support adding, 
removing, and updating packages. That probably also involves work on a 
server-side (i.e. repository) part.

* If necessary, add a caching mechanism to packagefs to speed up mounting it.

* Implement a GUI package manager.

I don't expect to complete all that in 160 hours. There'll probably also be 
tasks that I haven't thought of, which become obvious while working on it. At 
any rate I'm optimistic that significant headway can be made.

Please get back to me with a decision until June 18th.

CU, Ingo

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