Package Tools

"Woof is a "magical script" that can download packages of some other GNU/Linux distribution, cut them right down to Puppy-size, then build a Puppy Linux live-CD/DVD -- and do all of this totally automatically. The design of Woof is intended to be so flexible that packages from any distro can be processed.

"The Ape Base Compile System is a set of bash scripts to leverage both ESP EPM (http://www.epmhome.org/) and MREPO (http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/mrepo/) in maintaining Red Hat based systems that require custom and secluded binaries. If you need "Ape" to be an acronym, then go for "Application Packaging Environment" as christened by Mark Stokan. The original notion for the name was that this system was "aping" the performance of several tasks."

"EPM is an open source UNIX software and file packaging program that generates distribution archives from a list of files. EPM provides a complete, cross-platform software distribution solution for your applications.

ESP generates both native and "portable" script-based distribution packages complete with installation and removal scripts and standard install/uninstall GUIs. The installers can be customized with product logos, "readme" files, and click-wrap licenses as desired.

* Creates software packages that can be distributed on disc or over the Internet!

"AutoDeb is an experimental script to completely automate compiling and installing software.

The basic concept is that the user downloads any .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 archive created using autoconf (i.e. most programs), and types something like autodeb archive.tar.gz

The program will be configured, compiled and installed, and a binary .deb package will be created and installed on the system."

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AutoDeb

"A simple library-based package manager for Linux.

pacman is a utility which manages software packages in Linux. It uses simple compressed files as a package format, and maintains a text-based package database (more of a hierarchy), just in case some hand tweaking is necessary.

pacman does not strive to "do everything." It will add, remove and upgrade packages in the system, and it will allow you to query the package database for installed packages, files and owners. It also attempts to handle dependencies automatically and can download packages from a remote server.