OStatic

What user of open source has not wrestled with software installation at one time or another? If you're not tracking down conflicts or hunting for the download site for the current version of something, you're chasing dependencies in a seemingly-endless chain. Perhaps this is a symptom of the decentralized and rapidly-moving nature of open source - or perhaps not. Cloudsmith (in seemingly-eternal beta) suggests that there might be a way to get past at least some of the installation pain points.

Even though you can click on an icon on Cloudsmith to install software (say, the development kit for Google Android), it's not a software repository in the traditional sense of sites like SourceForge or RubyForge. Rather, it's a repository of software metadata: it stores information on where components come from, and the dependencies between different components. Any registered Cloudsmith user can assemble components to create their own software distribution, which is meant to be a complete package including dependencies necessary to install something.

Dependency checking, of course, is not new to open-source software install tools, from apt-get to gem. But what is distinctive here is that Cloudsmith can accomodate software using a variety of different install techniques, and even non-software assets like separate documentation, in the same distribution. In theory, this could allow developers to include all the dependencies in their package, even if they depended on a multitude of different technologies (which seems to be increasingly likely these days).

Cloudsmith itself is more of a proof of concept than a fully-useable universal system. Based on Eclipse technology, its current crop of distributions is heavy on Eclipse and Maven components, and light on everything else. I also think their tools for actually finding what's in Cloudsmith could use improvement. But as a general notion to make things easier, I think it shows promise.

What about you? Do you find yourself wrestling with cross-language and component installation issues enough to make a metadata repository useful? As a developer, would you take the time to specify your work for something like Cloudsmith? Or are you content just telling users what your package's dependencies are and letting them go chase on their own?

• distribution
• installation