[haiku-inc] Contract Proposal: Package Management

Howdy,

I'm currently doing a bit of planning for the time after the next few months. 
My current (for the money) project is estimated to end in October or November, 
so that I'll have to start looking for a subsequent project soon. I think this 
is an excellent opportunity to propose another package management related 
contract.

The package management development has more or less lain dormant since last 
year when Oliver and I had worked on it. In May I detailed on the development 
mailing list what would be a reasonable approach for continuing the work [1]. 
Assuming that no one else starts working on it in the meantime, that would also 
be my plan for the contract work. Should I finish with those steps before the 
end of the contract there'll still be plenty of work to do. As mentioned in my 
ML message, setting up remote repositories and extending pkgman to support 
installing from them would be another step. Implementing the package management 
daemon and its interactions with packagefs and pkgman is another sizable chunk 
of work. Furthermore the build system must be adjusted to pull stuff from 
repositories and deal with the optional build features (like ICU and OpenSSL) 
that live in packages.

If all that is done there'll still be several unaddressed TODOs [2] left: Like 
the build system having to identify files before packaging them, the expander 
rules needing to be reorganized, the boot loader bootstrap issue. Oh, well, and 
obviously the graphical package manager application.

My proposal is to work on package management roughly as outlined above 
(adjusting the plan (mainly the order of steps) as I see fit) for two periods 
of 160 work hours each (i.e. more or less the equivalent of two full-time 
months, though not necessarily on a full-time schedule) for 2000 Euros each, to 
be paid after the completion of each period.

As mentioned above the exact end date for my current project isn't fixed yet, 
so I can't give an exact date when I could start the proposed contract work. 
ATM things are looking good on my end, but I can't rule out any unexpected 
events that might add a few more months. In the worst case it might even 
collide with an extended vacation I was hoping to go on in the first quarter of 
2013, pushing the possible start date to March or even April.

Anyway, to keep things simple, I'd like to ask Haiku, Inc. to accept my 
proposal under the condition that I'll start until December 1st.

CU, Ingo

[1] http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/haiku-Package-Manager,2
[2] http://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/PackageManagement/TODO

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