Kyrios is a package manager manager. Today software deployment has fractured to the point where it is difficult to know ahead of time which package manager one should use to install something on a given platform.
For example, if I asked you to install a package called git-open,
your first job would be to figure out where that is. A little digging
would show you that it is at https://github.com/paulirish/git-open.
Then you would learn that you need to have npm installed in order to
install git-open, because git-open is apparently written using
javascript, which of course has its own de facto package manager,
npm. But how do you get npm installed? Well, you'll have to hunt
that down, too.
But wait, once you've got all of that installed, I might ask you
to install nephele. And guess what? That's available here:
https://github.com/earlye/nephele. It's pretty easy to install.
That is, if you have pip available, because nephele is written
in python, and its package manager is pip.
Other package managers one might find on OSX include homebrew,
gem, docker, vagrant, bower, old-fashioned
download;configure;make;make-install, and on and on and on. Other
platforms (linux, Windows) have the same problem, to varying degree.
A lot of these package managers and the packages they manage are small, but necessary parts of the software development process itself. So setting up a workstation on which to develop has become an annoying hassle. There's got to be a way to simplify things. Kyrios is an attempt to do that.
I'm not building Kyrios to replace those package managers. Instead,
I just want a single manager to control all the other ones. It would be
nice if it could make "set up my development box" be as simple as
kyrios {my-profile}.yaml, perhaps repeatedly if there are packages
that require a reboot.
That's the vision. It's nowhere near that... yet.
Kyrios means "master" in Greek.
Well, actually it's kýrios.
No, that's not quite true either. It's κύριος.
Well, that's what Google translate tells me anyway. Greek is hard, so
I Americanized it. Google tells me that if I take my Americanized
version, kyrios and translate it from Greek to English, it means
mainly. Meh. Close enough.
The following features are what I think are necessary to get from the null-set to a version 1.0:
-
A fairly robust set of package information including dependencies. Note that dependencies here does not necessarily mean "all the things a package depends on," because the front-line package managers typically manage that sort of thing and therefore replicating that info here would be overkill. Dependencies here really means something more like, "You need to install this using package manager 'X'."
-
A fairly robust collection of package manager definitions for OSX, Linux, and Windows. Windows in particular will be a challenge because Cygwin doesn't really have a package manager. This means lots of rebooting, probably.
-
A fairly robust mechanism for removing packages.
-
Not written in python, because just setting up python to do anything non-trivial is ridiculously difficult. Ideally we'd have a single binary file you could run.
Beyond that:
- It would be nice to see a community form around this, where others are providing package definitions and the like.
-
Complexity-of-use - I really don't want this to be difficult to install or use. I've intentionally kept the dependencies minimal (python and pip), so that setting up a new box is basically "get python & pip installed, then run kyrios.sh."
-
Replacing package manager 'X' - If you prefer some other package manager, that's fine. I'm not trying to replace it. I'm trying to make my own life easier. Yes, I'm aware of things like ansible, puppet, and chef. No, I'm not going to use them for this problem.
If your organization is using kyrios, I'd love to hear about it. Specifically, I'd love for you to add your company's logo to this section via a PR. Thanks in advance!